Baby Talk

As with all babies, Addisyn has known how to communicate her wants and needs from the very beginning.  She didn't have to learn to tell me what she wanted, I just had to learn what things meant.

Of course the most important thing that a newborn communicates is when they are hungry.  Fortunately I knew going into motherhood what signals I should look for, because they are very subtle: smacking or sucking on gums, sucking on hands, rooting, heck, even just being awake in a lot of newborns is a sign that it's time to eat.  Addisyn would suck on her hands like nobody's business!  I knew that crying was a last resort, reserved (as far as hunger goes) for those occasions when the polite ways of requesting milk weren't working.

Babies do cry, of course.  Those first several weeks before I had really started "figuring her out" were tough.  If she had just eaten we'd check the diaper first.  If we had just changed her diaper (unless we heard something...) I'd try feeding her first.  But sometimes there just seemed to be no rhyme or reason to any of it.  She woke up one night during the first week and I nursed her and put her back into her bassinet, asleep. I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back into our bedroom she was awake and crying again.  My husband, who had slept through the initial waking and feeding, asked "is she hungry?"  I broke down.  But at around 5 weeks I felt like I had a pretty good handle on things, I was much more confident in my ability to decipher what she was telling me.

                                                                                                                     

Around 6 months we started working on baby sign language.  For months I tried to teach her the sign for "more".  Over and over again at meal times I would ask if she wanted more, signing it each and every time I said the word.  I would show her how to make the sign with her own hands.  She just never seemed interested, and eventually I stopped trying.  Then, months later, she just randomly started signing it!  We ask her what she wants and she signs "more".  A lot of the time if she is hungry she just follows us around signing "more".  After the breaking of the ice with that first sign, others have been a lot easier. It is incredible watching them learn to communicate in a more "grown up" fashion.

She has been saying "da", meaning "that", for months now.  She points at everything - "da da".  Every morning when I go to get her out of her crib she hands me her blankie - "da", she points at a butterfly on the wall by her crib - "da", she shows me her soother - "da".  When she wants to nurse she tells me "na na".

I also realized that she began making animal noises on her own as well.  When my husband gets home from work our dog, Bailey, goes nuts.  Every time this happens Addisyn makes "oof, oof" sounds, and at first I thought she was just excited.  Then one day we were outside playing and she heard a dog barking a few houses away and started making her "oof, oof" sounds - she was barking!  Now we can ask her what the dog says (or any other animal, for that matter) and she says "oof, oof, oof".


Not really baby talk, per se, but I am very impressed with the things I can ask her about and she knows what they are.  Eyes, ears, noses, feet, toes, hands, fingers, books, balls, shoes... the list goes on and on.  Bailey often ends up being the subject of our little quizzes, and Addisyn shows us her feet, nose, eyes (read: poking the eyes) ears, and tail.

Like all parents, I make it a point to repeatedly tell her what things are, frequently.  But it's still almost unbelievable when I see that she has learned it.