Jonah the Jabberbox

In the past months, Jonah's vocabulary has expanded tremendously. Even if we wanted to inventory the number of words he knows at this point, I'm sure we would miss many, particularly as he learns new words and concepts every single day. He repeats words and phrases that he hears us say, "sings" simple songs, can complete couplets from books that are a part of the regular reading rotation, and pretty regularly uses 4-6 word sentences (sometimes longer). He does now use some prepositions and articles, such as "the," but he does not generally employ pronouns yet (for the most part, he still refers to himself as Jonah rather than using I or me or mine). He creates regular plurals without a problem and has started to use some past tense as well.

For the most part, he is pretty understandable, and his words sound like they are supposed to, though we've heard some changes in how he uses the letter "s" and "p" at the beginning of words: "school bus" now sounds like "cool bus;" "spoon" now sounds like "foon;" "pancakes" now sounds like "cancakes," and "police car" sounds like "colice car." We're not sure what is going on there, as he used to say these words without a problem. Perhaps some of the younger kids in his room are influencing his speech patterns??

While we often wish that he didn't wake up quite so early in the morning (pretty much between 5:45 and 6:15 each day), Jonah is generally pretty happy to stay in his crib and jabber to himself. It's amazing to listen to him across the baby monitor, and we often wish we knew what exactly he is thinking and how he moves from one idea to another. Sometimes the "transitions" seem logical, but more often than not, we have no idea how he gets from Idea A to Idea B.

Last week, Jonah was particularly talkative at bedtimes. On Thursday - Uncle David's birthday, as well as that of our friend Kristin - he went on saying "happy birthday to you" ad nauseam, mixed in with some other concepts and ideas, for nearly an hour. I set my phone to create a voice memo via the baby monitor in order to capture some of his jabbering for posterity's sake. Here's a sample from that with a fairly recent picture as backdrop so I could actually upload it to YouTube (Grandpa Gregg should be glad to hear some references in there to Popperville!).