Language Explosion?

Ever since the acquisition of "whoa!" the other night, Hallie seems to be going through something of a language explosion, apparently related to her recognition that consonants and vowels can be linked together to form words.

As I noted, it started with "whoa" and Hallie remains fascinated by saying this over and over. Because the original "whoa" (prompted by me) was related to me knocking over the stroller, Hallie likes to go over to her Maclaren stroller, knock it over, and say "whoa." Then it's my job to stand it upright again, and her job to knock it over and say "whoa" again. You can see how this might provide hours and hours of endless fun.

We didn't get this on video yet, but we have been promoting the broader use of the word "whoa" and Hallie's complied by exporting this to other situations (especially when prompted to imitate us). In this lovely video of Sharon swinging Hallie, Hallie uses "again" and "whoa":



But "whoa" was just the beginning. Last night, Hallie was all about words. She followed me into the kitchen as I was getting her dinner put away and spied the bubbles in the cabinet under the sink. I'm not sure how she saw them (it was a very tiny bottle, nested among a huge number of poorly-organized larger bottles and boxes of wraps and such) or how she recognized them (this is not a bottle of bubbles we use much; she has seven or eight other bottles in circulation in the living room and dining room that we do use), but she noticed them and called out "Bubble". Not "b," or even "bu" or "bu-bu" but "bubble." Well, with that kind of speaking, you know we were going to indulge the kid. So, while this is not the best video ever taken in the history of the universe, this is what we got:



On top of this, Hallie seems to be able to "bird" now (with reference to the red bird in Brown Bear, Brown Bear and is doing a better job of attempting to say "dog" and "fishie". She has also said "teacher" when we got to the teacher page in that book, too. That's useful, since that's what I do (when not blogging). "Architect" might be a ways off so she might have to refer to Sharon as a "builder." But, heck, we'll take plain old "mommy" which we hope is forthcoming one of these days. (Hallie still says "um-ah!" in a very long, drawn-out kind of way when we ask her to say "mama." Yesterday, though, I did hear one regular-sounding "mama" and a few whiny ones from our girl, so there's still hope that she might master this skill by Mother's Day.

But even if she doesn't master that skill, we do have an advanced Mother's Day gift from our girl: 2 more vomit free days...making it 4 days in a row without vomit and a whopping 5 out of 6 of the most recent days that have been spew-free. Amazing how much more peaceful the house feels without us rushing about cleaning up upchuck.