The Gabber

It's truly amazing how the development of language takes place in kids - we are having a great time witnessing Arlo's transformation from the babbles of infancy to sign language to a using a few words and now whole (correct!) sentences.  Just as he turned 2 he was trying out a lot of new words and we marveled at his expansion of vocabulary.  He finally said "Grammy" and "Pater" when we visited family this past June, although we certainly missed his "ehh-ehh" cough for Grandpa when he put a word to it.  He's got a good grasp now on most words - he'll try to say anything these days, even the hard to pronounce words like "exercise", "forwards", "transporter", "umbilical cord"....  Beyond individual words, though, he has blown us away with a great use of sentences and he's even getting some of the more difficult things like how to use indirect and direct objects.  About 3 months ago he referred to himself in the third person all the time ("Arlo wants a cracker") but not he's got first person down and even conjugates most verbs correctly for it.  Today he told me "That sandwich is yours; this one is mine."  Perfectly.  He is certainly absorbing tons of language from all the books we read cause he talks about them and tells bits of the stories while he's playing, and he has several of them at least partially memorized.  What really gets me is how quickly he made the transition to this level of communications.  I guess it's normal but I've never experienced it before.  Looking back 6 months and realizing he couldn't talk to us then but now he won't stop, well, it's just kind of miraculous.  One of the many, many things about raising kids. Makes me proud to be a mom.