Leash!

It seems that every day Nate does something new and exciting that makes us so proud. This is a big one...his first word! Yesterday he started repeating the word "leash". It started as "eash" but, as you can hear in the video below, he's added the "l" sound and now says the word quite clearly and correctly.




Nate understands many other words that he can't yet verbalize. Those words include Piper (one of the first he knew), Mama, Dada, milk, bouncer (jumperoo thing in the doorway), music (cd player), ball (refers to one specific ball that he absolutely loves), and balloon. The first five words he picked up on his own and the rest we "taught" him through conversations like this..."Here is your BALL. This is a BALL. Throw the BALL. BALL. BALL. BALL." Now if we say "music", he immediately looks at the cd player, or "milk" and he looks right to his bottle. So back to leash...he loves playing with Piper's leash and yesterday while he was playing with it I started in on "This is Piper's LEASH. LEASH. LEASH", etc. and he responded with "eash, eash, eash". I was so excited that I woke up Edward to have him come listen. Earlier today he looked over at the leash, put out his hand trying to reach it and said "leash!". How wonderful that he can communicate what he wants with words (well, a word so far). We are so proud and hope his vocabulary expands rapidly.

"music"
We've been listening to the Beach Boys--upbeat and kid friendly (i guess?). We've been working on clapping to the beat of the songs. It seems Nate has no sense of rhythm. Sorry, kid!

Another word he understands--Elmo! He has lots of Elmo exposure--Tickle-me-Elmo, Elmo books, and Sesame Street, of course.

the beloved leash

Another favorite play thing--wires. He's always had a thing for sweatshirt strings, or really any string, wires, the leash, etc. Don't worry, I always supervise when he's playing with such things. And of course he's only allowed wires that aren't plugged into anything. :-)

He's off to the couch!