January 23, 2001 - Tuesday
Harry's vocabulary is clearly gaining momentum. First, and much to his mother's fascination, Harry has taking a decidedly masculine turn from identifying cars ("car" easily emerged from his noted ability to pronounce "cat") to pointing out trucks with "uck" at every opportunity in both books and live on the road, now from his front-facing visage in the car. Actually, the path to truck isn't really that surprisingly, or stereotypical male to me. One of Harry's favorite books (books, incidentally, are now often "ook") from early on was Byron Barton's Machine's At Work and that features many large pieces of capital equipment including various types of truck.

Harry has also now gotten surprisingly good at identifying a variety of animals in books. That all seem to be "cats" has been something of an admitted sticking point, but he's progressed enough to smartly find an oft well hidden dog on each page of his book "Henry and Amy," as well as animals in many other books. This morning we even had something of a breakthrough on the "cat" hang-up. Harry has a cloth book of Christmas Carols that, while past season, still features the fascination of several animal pictures. They are mostly teddy bears, but also a donkey, a horse, a few sheep, a couple of birds, and a cow. Harry's recently gotten a big kick out of labeling especially the donkey and horse "cat" and he's almost gleefully emphatic as I correct him that they indeed go by other names. This morning, though, when we turned to the right page, Harry paused for a moment and said, before I did, "awkey." There's no doubt about this one. Other than "dad'n," this is his first two syllable word and, thus, not an accident. In a separate incident in his crib, Harry correctly marked a panda as "brr."

One of the funniest new words, at least for now while it's still novel, is Harry's "no." This one sort of goes back and forth between "nuh, nuh, nuh" and the more endearing "nay, nay, nay, nay, nay" and is becoming more common. And, "doe" is emerging as another instructive command denoting his desire to be put or let down from either our arms or a chair.

There are others babble sounds, too, that make no sense to anyone other than Harry. My personal favorite is an "oobaly, oobaly" sound that he makes trying to manipulate his mouth into the words he's heard for more than a year. It seems like the floodgates could open at any time. And, today, there was a hint of his most anticipated word. I wasn't there, but after more than a solid month of "dad'n" meaning something like parent, Harry reported said "mama" in the direction of the right person. There's no doubt Harry knows his special relationship to that other person who is really not dad'n, because he often seeks her out calling "dad, dad, dad" or clings to her legs in the kitchen, or, much to my resignation, lunges for her as I'm trying to comfort a fall or other casualty of toddler life. Somehow, though, "mama" hasn't been discovered yet. But, maybe it's close.


Comments, opinions?