One Two Four

Alyce knows how to count. Well she knows how to count to two. And I think she understands that two is more than one. However, I think she applies two to mean more than one. When we ask Alyce to count whatever is in front of her she always counts one, two, and then four. If there is more than three things she will say "one, two, four, two, four" some other list of numbers. Mom and I are trying to get her to say one, two, three, four and just recently she has been. Most days Alyce is feeling kind of sassy and skips three almost on purpose. I don't mind that she can't count to 10+. She really isn't old enough to do it anyway. Any child her age if he/she can count to 10 is doing it only by rote memorization and doesn't really know the difference between 7 and 8 except that one comes after the other (1).

(1) http://www.babycenter.com/404_how-and-when-should-i-teach-my-child-her-numbers_6899.bc

I Want, I Need

Alyce's vocabulary is constantly increasing. I can't even put a number on the words she knows. What is now even more fun / interesting is that she is learning to use her new found ability to communicate. Over the past few weeks Alyce has been starting to say I want and I need. Before then she would just say the name of want she wanted; apple juice being a good example. She would just say apple juice over and over again. So now she says "I want apple juice" and if we fail to get her some juice a few minutes later she says "I need apple juice". Her saying I want and I need is pretty cool with the one exception is that she will say it over and over again until we respond to her or get her some juice.

Yeahpuh

We have a new word to add to the list of our favorite Alyce words. An Alyce word is a normal word that has its pronunciation modified (butchered) by Alyce. A few good examples are "doobit" for do it and "turbin" for turtle. Overtime she eventually gets the pronunciation right and we never hear her version again; turbin being a casualty.

The new word that we need to add to the list is "yeahpuh". Yeahpuh is a conglomeration of yeah and uh-huh. Alyce used to say uh-huh exclusively with yeah starting to creep in. I'm guessing that eventually yeah will take over and hopefully it will be replaced by yes.

Another word Alyce is starting to use is please. When she asks for something like more milk we correct her asking her to say "more milk please". Now about one time in ten she will use the word please without being asked.

Alyce Knows Her Colors

In a previous post Alyce referred to purple as purpin. Even though she butchers the pronunciation of her colors she does know them. We can ask her to point to a specific color and she will. We can also ask her what color something is and she responds correctly. I would say Alyce knows all the primary and secondary colors. She knows red, blue, yellow (her favorite), green, purple, pink, and orange. She also knows brown, and white. Most of her pronunciation is close enough that people other than Mommy and I know what she is saying. Yellow is yewwow, purple is purpin sometimes purpilin, and blue is bwue. Mom and I are proud of her and how far she has come in such a short amount of time.

First Conversation

During this same weekend of room improvements I had my first conversation with Alyce. On Saturday I was painting a section of wall and Alyce came in and joined me. The conversation proceeded like this.

Alyce: "Daddy paint."
Daddy: "Yes I am."
Daddy: "What am I painting?"
Alyce: Something unintelligible.
Daddy: "I'm painting a wall."
Alyce: "Wall."
Daddy: "Who's wall am I painting?"
Alyce: "Mine."
Daddy: "Who's room am I painting?"
Alyce: "Mine."
Daddy: "What color am I painting?"
Alyce: "Purrpin." (Her word for purple)
Daddy: "Do you like this color?"
Alyce: "Uh huh."

After a few minutes of watching.
Alyce: "Bye bye."
Daddy: "Where you going?"
Alyce: "Downstairs."
Daddy: "What are you going to do down there?"
Alyce: "Mommy."
Daddy: "Be careful going down the stairs."
Alyce: "Uh huh."

A little while later Alyce came back upstairs and we had a repeat of the conversation from before. This time when I asked her what I was painting she responded correctly with "wall".

She Can Say Her Last Name

Today Mommy taught Alyce her last name. I wasn't there for the first time but Mommy called me at the office then put Alyce on speaker phone so I could hear it. It was unbelievable how clearly she said it too. Alyce will just repeat our last name when we ask her to say it. She won't say the name when we ask her what her last name is. I'm sure that will come soon enough.

I was so proud of her and I think she was proud of herself too. If she said the name once she said it twenty times all the while giggling and squealing with excitement.

Dish Wasser

Mommy and I had a big day today. We got a new dishwasher! The new one has a six hour delay so now we won't forget to turn on the wash. Typically we waited until we would go to bed to start the washer. We did this because it was so loud we couldn't hear the tv. So how does this relate to Alyce and her world? Well other than she should have more clean cups something cute happened during the installation.

As the installer guy was taking out the old dishwasher Alyce was in my arms. As the guy was moving the old washer out of the slot under the counter top Alyce pointed to it and said "wassur". She was trying to say washer, but we knew what she meant. To our knowledge Alyce didn't know the word washer but out it came. After Alyce's nap she walked into the kitchen and saw the newly installed dishwasher. This time she said "dish wassur". I think Alyce approves of the new applicance. It has lots of buttons that she can press. I know that Mom and I like it. It's quietly running the background while I am writing this. It also has a lockout so Alyce's button presses won't matter a bit.

.Com

Alyce's vocabulary is taking another step. In the past few weeks all sorts of new words and phrases have crept up. This past weekend I heard a commercial that had a website address with a .com. I asked Alyce if she could say Dot Com. Sure enough she responded with a perfect "Dot Com". Other neat phrases that Alyce has parroted is "Prize Puzzle" from our favorite game show Wheel of Fortune.

On Sunday night the family was sitting down for some pizza. After dinner we gave Jake our dog a piece of pizza. When we put the pizza in Jake's bowl Alyce let loose with the comment "Jakie eat pizza". Alyce is kind of behind when it comes to speech development. At this point 2+ years she should have some limited two word sentences and maybe some three word sentences. Alyce has put two words together but it is usually at our request. She will say things like "love you" but only after we ask her to say it or she will repeat something we said. In this case Alyce had a three word sentence that she put together on her own. Another two word phrase Alyce made on her own is "daddy home" when I came home from work earlier this week.

Yes and No

We have had other big milestones over the past few days. Well maybe in the past few weeks. Alyce is starting to say yes. Well not say yes as much as nod her approval. For the longest time (seems like forever) Alyce has had "no" down pat. She can shake her head no, and can say no in O so many ways. Refer here if you would like to read about that.

Now that Alyce is nodding her approval we can cut down on all the questions we have to ask her like do you want juice? "No". Do you want water? "No". Do you want milk? *silence* must mean yes. So now we have the opposite. Do you want juice? *nods yes*. We still might have to ask all the questions, but at least we know for sure what she wants. Most of the time when she nods approval she actually means it.

We are hoping that in the future we will be able to ask Alyce what she wants and gives a specific response. It will happen, just not sure when. In the mean time we will just have to stick with 20 questions.

A Two Word Sentence

A milestone has been reached! Alyce has said her first two word sentence. It happened Wednesday night and only now do I get a chance to write about it. When I get home from my spinning class I am usually wearing my cycling shoes. That night I took them off in the kitchen after Alyce met me at the door. This time she was very interested in them. So much that she slipped her feet into them and started clumsily walking around the kitchen. She then walked into the living room with them still on and promptly said "Daddy shoes".

Hard to believe that two words can signify something so profound. For starters just putting two different words together is a milestone, but to know and understand the possessive aspect of them being my shoes is also an important step.

Chili Dogs

Alyce surprised us tonight. During dinner dad had a chili dog and as usual he offered Alyce a bite. When he asked Alyce if she wanted a bite of chili dog she responded with a crystal clear chili dog. Both dad and I were speechless. We tried to get her to repeat the word unsuccessfully.

Alyce also had two other words today. Cheetah and girl. Alyce parroted me while I was showing her pictures of animals in a book we got from the zoo. She said girl while dad was playing with her after he got home from work. This puts her up to 45 words!

Accelerating Vocabulary

Alyce's vocabulary really seems to be taking off as of late. In the past few days we have added the words car, chicken, bowl, and peach. We are quickly approaching the goal set out by our pediatrician of 50 words by 24 months. At the point we are up to 40 words and she is only 21 months!

New Words to Add to the List

Alyce has had a few new words this week. One new word shoes showed up when she grabbed a shoe held it up to mom and said shoes! The second word is actually two words but we will count it as one since only mom and I can understand it. The two new words are fruit loops which comes out as oop oops.

Alyce's Words

Daddy and I decided to come up with a list of all the words that Alyce says. The list is as follows:

Clock (comes out as glock or gock), I Love You (comes out as I dub du), cracker, bubble, apple, please, doggie, Jakie, woof-woof (comes out as woo-woo), meow (comes out as eow), baby, me, thank you, Mommy and Daddy. And this morning she said book while picking up Mommy's book.

She even uses some words at the appropriate times like hello, hi, bye-bye, all gone, no, ah oh and weee! For example, yesterday Alyce was playing with her Chatty Telephone (you know the one that everyone had when they were little) and she was saying hello into it and then right before she hung up she said bye-bye. It was super cute!

She has also had a developmental breakthrough. She now knows who me and Alyce are. When we ask her who is me she points to herself. In addition when we ask her who Alyce is she points to herself again.

Noooo

Alyce has a new favorite word, no. She says it a lot these days. She uses where you are supposed to use it I guess. In situations such as "Alyce can you please eat some sandwich?" the answer might be No. It might also be yes, but she doesn't say yes, she just does whatever it is we are wanting her to do or what she wants to do. What is kind of funny about her saying no is that she has so many ways of saying it. Sometimes it will be short quiet no, other times it will be a long drawn out melodic nooooo. One of my favorites and the most frustrating at the same time is that when we are sitting down for dinner and she doesn't want to eat what we are offering. She says no and proceeds to pull down on her face so that we can see the backs of her lower eye lids. How can you make eat when they are showing you the backs of their eyelids?

I figure this is all part of her developing as an individual. It would be nice to know what she would like rather than us guessing. I think a lot of issues we are having is that she can't vocalize what she wants, she can only vocalize what she doesn't want. I am hoping this will blow over like changing her diapers did. In the past she used to fight and squirm every time we tried to change a diaper. Now we can just ask her to lay down and 90% of the time she does it.

The Vocabulary Keeps Growing

Alyce's vocabulary continues to grow. Yesterday on the way back form running some errands she said "Thank You". Well it was really more of an "Ank You", but we got the drift. A lot of her words are coming from parroting off of us. In this particular instance we were asking her to say thank you and she replied. That interactive style of learning words is how she is doing most of her speech. Very rarely has she picked up a word from our conversation and used them back at us without prompting. The only word coming to mind that falls into the on her own category is apple.

Roller Hockey

Tonight we all went to our neighbor Jeff's hockey game. As you can tell Alyce is really interested in the game. She did say the word hockey so that's a plus.

Jeff and his wife Liz are our next door neighbors. We hang out with them quite a bit and they are our babysitters of choice when Grams and Grandpa aren't available. Liz is Alyce's favorite adult on the block. Every time Alyce sees Liz outside she walks over and gives Liz a big hug. If they are at our house when Alyce is going to bed she also blesses them with another hug. If they really rate they even get a kiss.

Liz always has to keep her cellphone hidden because Alyce loves to play with it. Alyce will rummage through Liz's purse looking for it unless we stop her.

Chatterbox

Alyce is being quite the chatterbox. Just today alone she started saying four new words. She said Grandpa, cookie, jakie, and bitsy. Bitsy is our cute name for her. It started off at little bits, but we eventually shortened it to Bitsy. Jakie is what we call our dog Jake.

Jake is our pet dog. He is half lab and half Staffordshire Terrier. Some people would call that a Pit Bull, but that sounds so negative. He is a great dog, loyal, and very patient with Alyce. His one flaw is that he will never back down from another dog. We have that under control by using some of the Dog Whisperer's techniques.

Grrr.