Owen had his 1 year checkup this week. Between the measurements (31.5 inches, 21 lbs 9 oz) and the shots ("WAAAAH!") the doctor wanted to know what he's been up to. "What's he saying?" turned out to be a difficult question. He says "down", as I posted before. What other words does he have? Well, what counts as a word? "What does the cow say?" was such a success that within days he had learned to not only moo like a cow, but baa like a sheep, roar like a tiger (and a dinosaur), click like a dolphin, wail like a siren (he's a city baby, after all), open and close his mouth soundlessly like a fish, meow like a cat, hiss like a snake, and sing a song ("la la la"). We taught him some of these tricks, and some he learned at daycare. We try to pair the sounds with pictures, so now, for example, he says "baa" not only when we ask him what the sheep says, but also when he sees the picture of the sheep in his bedtime book. The noises are clearly starting to take on meaning, as he learned last weekend to say "aaa" (either "cat" or "meow", we're not sure which) whenever he saw Nana's cat.
Most startling of all, a few weeks ago he picked up a fire engine puzzle piece and starting wailing like a siren. We were shocked. Nana had taught him that the noises he hears outside at night were sirens, but here he was visually identifying the source of the noise, which we had never taught him. More than that, he had generalized; having been trained on "what does the siren say?" I was so impressed by his identification of the puzzle piece that I asked him later that night "what does the fire engine say?" and he wailed again. Figuring that someone must have taught him this, we asked his daycare teachers, but they hadn't either. They did point out, however, that they regularly go for walks past fire engines, so he could have figured it out himself. And so he has. He has grasped the connection between the mysterious noises outside his bedroom window, the big red trucks that go by making the same noises, the picture of that big red truck on a puzzle piece, and the words "siren" and "fire engine".
For the record, when the doctor asked, we said he had two words, "down" and "cat". For all that that siren noise communicates to his scientist parents about his consciousness, thought processes, and capacity for representational language - in the end, it's still just a siren noise!
