At nearly 16 months old, Elisabeth’s vocabulary is now up to about 70 words. (I keep a running list in a note on my iPhone!) She chatters away most of the time, usually recognisable words. She’s starting to put words together like “clip open” (little bag clips are one of her favourite things) and “keys open” when she wants a door opened. She’s picked up exclamations like “oh no!”. She’s just recently started saying “no” with a lot more frequency.
The words she uses the most are probably “up” and “again”. It’s rare that we can sing a song or read a book or do something funny without Elisabeth commanding “again!”. We sing songs over and over and over and over again. She says “again” to the TV as well. (Especially to the TV theme songs that she really likes – Chuggington, Timmy Time and Bob the Builder.) There’s not much point yet in trying to explain to her that the TV doesn’t repeat things on demand.
She can point to photos on the fridge and name Opa, Oma, Tante (my sister Erin) and “Ah-yah” (her cousin Leah) without prompting, and she can point to other people when asked to. She loves Skyping with Oma & Opa and with Leah & Aunt Dana.
I’m very much enjoying having a kid who is getting better and better at communicating and expressing herself. And language development is absolutely fascinating!
As I mentioned in the previous post, Elisabeth is getting pretty good with animal sounds and can do a lot of them, but her favourite animal sound is definitely “quack, quack”. She loves ducks. She pointed out that there was a picture of a duck on her toothbrush – something that had escaped James’ and my attention. She even says, “Quack, quack” when she sees pigeons. I’ve tried to teach her that pigeons say “coo”, but as far as she is concerned, they are ducks and she loves chasing them.
This past weekend we ventured over to the Brick Lane Sunday markets and, having done some market browsing and eaten a rather late lunch, were waiting at the end of Commercial Street to get a bus home. Elisabeth was looking down the road and said, “Quack, quack!” We thought that she was looking at some birds flying in the sky and pointed out that they weren’t actually ducks. But she continued to periodically say, “Quack, quack!” even when they were no birds visible in the sky.
Finally James spotted that an LED billboard down the street was showing an O2 advert which featured several very large rubber ducks! It was one of about 5 or 6 adverts that were cycling through fairly quickly. But every time the advert with the ducks came around, Elisabeth piped up, “Quack, quack!” She had spotted it long before either of us did. Leave it to her to notice the ducks!
