A Small Warning

While Simon and I are doing this to keep our friends/family/acquaintences in the know and so that we can remember the experience - we know that a great many people forget the insane emotions that go through them at a time like this. They remember joy, nervousness and excitement but tend to forget things like annoyance, anger and exhaustion. This is also a little bit of an experiment for us as well as (hopefully) a bit of reality for someone else out there who wants a bit of a real play-by-play of the emotional rollercoaster of childbirth and parenting. ...granted, I know that my experience is only one...but hey...still worth trying.

That said, not all of this blog is going to be happy and shiny. There will be some real, raw emotions here and we're going to express them pretty openly. We hope that this doesn't make anyone feel as if we're in any way unhappy about the birth of our son or that we're somehow not excited or don't love him. For us, this is the reality of things that people don't really talk about or express. I think that is extremely important to remember.

We may use foul language. ...you're warned.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

When Is A Word A Word?

I've been wondering this for a while now. Xander started saying "dada" when he was a mere 7 months old. It made his father light up but I didn't count it as a word because it seemed to be simple babbling.

When, at 9 months old he started saying "mama", I completely discounted it as well, nice as it made me feel. However, when he was scared by a vacuum or got water in his eyes or nose in the bath, "MAMA!" was what he would yell. After this, I wasn't sure.

When we are holding him and he drops a toy - or something similar happens - we say "Uh oh!". I did not even pay that much attention to how often we say it until he started saying it back. Again, I discounted it as simple mimicking. Then I noticed that whenever he drops a toy or someone else does, he looks up at them and says "uh oh". ...clearly he has associated it with accidents. Is this his first real word? So I started wondering - when are the sounds he makes a word?


Was "dada" his first word despite him probably only babbling it?

Was that simple title "mama" his first word?

Was his first real word "uh oh"? ...or does that sound even count as a word at all?

When he decided that the cats were called "ah..T" (soft ah, slight pause, hard T) at 8 months, was that a word?

It's a tricky question!!!