So that’s how that works

Until about a week ago, Curly was mostly saying one and two word phrases: ‘big truck’, ‘dog eat’, ‘bye mommy’, ‘want more.’ Occasionally we would hear a 3 word phrase: ‘more cereal please’, ‘I got it’, ‘No want it.’ Without comparing his language skills to his peers, of equal or lesser age, it seemed Curly’s language skills were slooooowly increasing and not terribly shabby. Compared to the rest of the kids in his daycare class, they were largely lacking and it worried us. When would he start using sentences? Pronouns? The word ‘the’? Referring to himself? Expressing himself better? All the other kids were already doing it. We had considered for the 900th time getting him evaluated again. He just seemed so behind.

And then it happened. We had heard stories of people saying ‘one day my kid wasn’t really talking, and then next day, boom! Language explosion.’ We thought it might not happen for Curly. That he would need extra help. But then we began noticing him using 4 and 5 word sentences. Referring to himself with ‘me’ and ‘my’ and us with ‘you’ and ‘your.’ Using the word ‘the.’ Talking, talking, talking. People said, ‘don’t worry, once he starts talking he won’t stop’…and we see now, they’re right.

Things we’ve heard over the past few days: ‘Open the box, mommy’ (‘please’ after coaxing him)’, ‘I need a tissue’, ‘This my hat, not your hat’, ‘Mommy comin downstairs!’, ‘I wanna go [friend] house’, ‘[Curly] get in the car’, ‘Train broken, Ima, fix please’, ‘[Curly] see BIIIG boat!’  He much more consistently uses people’s names, instead of not calling them anything like he used to. He asks ‘what’s that?’ all the time and listens to what we tell him, repeating the words we say much more often. He tells us what’s happened at school when we ask…well, a couple things of interest at least. His pronunciation is still pretty poor, but that’s normal at his age. We are just so relieved and happy to hear what he has to say.