Now you're really talk-ing

I’m really pleased at how things are going for Matt speech-wise that sometimes, I just can’t help feeling ridiculously melodramatic. Especially when I think of him as that scrawny unprotesting three-week old infant in a hospital room. Oh man.

But oh, the joy of a mother seeing her kid grow-up (or hearing her kid grow-up) wonderfully.

And wonderful really comes to mind when I think of darling son at this particular stage when speech develops rapidly.

And yes, he’s carefully building and expanding his vocabulary these days. Steadily building. Sometimes by "parroting" the adults. And sometimes, by cleverly creating his own language. Hence, I find myself crossing the bridge of amazement to one of amusement in so many instances.

At his age, I think he’s doing great. He’s even doing much better than most 18 to 24 month-old kids I’ve seen around here.

His vowels are good and his consonants, equally so. Thanks to, maybe, Sesame Street. And maybe some credit goes to my mother who coaches him in most of her “sitting” time.

His consonant clusters need to be improved though. For instance, he needs to work on the “ch” which he enunciates as “sh.” (So his match would sound like mash) But I’m not so bent on making him sweat on that at this time. Let time deal with that.

Then lately, Matt has been fond of using the –ing form of the verb. Like when before it was “drive,” now he’d say “driving.” Or eating for eat, calling for call, dropping for drop, cooking for cook, etc.

I think this latest development in his speech is somewhat amusing.

One time, while pointing to some eggs he told me, “Maa, egg ah want.” I was so busy doing the dishes then. But he went on by stressing “egging*, egging” to me. It must have bugged him to see his mother so inattentive to him, and bugged him enough that he was able to concoct a single word, in its –ing form, equivalent to his request.

On top of that, I hear him “create” new words by adding –ing to root word in our dialect. By far, the most popular word is tawaging (which he sometimes say while lifting our landline handset).

He also has this amusingly strange habit of trailing some Visayan translations after some words. Like when he says drop (or dropping), he’d also say hulog following that. Or gahi after saying hard, etc.




* not used to denote pushing or prodding
noun, tawag means call; verb, to call.