I love going in to get my daughter up from a nap or going to pick her up from my Dad’s if she’s been there for a few hours. The reason? She always greets me with an enthusiastic ‘Daddy!’ and usually a sprinting hug too.
Emi is currently at that stage where she can say a lot of things that Jess and I understand but nobody else does. She can say the standard things like Mummy, Daddy, Oopert (Rupert), Nanna, Gandad (Grandad) and t-shirt (she sleeps with one at night.)
But although she doesn’t really say too much, I’m not too worried. For starters, her brother was a ‘late talker’ whereby he didn’t really say much until he was between 18 months and two where it seemed he picked up a word a day. Also, it’s not like we don’t know what she’s saying or what she wants, she doesn’t suffer from not being able to communicate what it is that she wants – spoiler alert it’s usually always cake (yes, she’s my daughter, she bloody loves cake.)
They say that children will either speak and have more trouble with their walking or walk confidently without saying much – Emi definitely falls into the latter camp. She learned to walk around her first birthday, we think it was mainly so she could run around with her brother. But in that point comes one of the reasons why she doesn’t speak too much; her brother does all the talking for her.
Despite saying earlier that Rupert didn’t talk too quickly he’s more than making up for it now (he’s deep in the ‘why’ phase) and he will ask for food and then turn to Emi and say ‘Emi, would you like a snack too?’ She then only has to say ‘yeah.’
She’s clever though, without knowing how to say words, she’s really clever. And she constantly amazes me. Just recently I took her for a walk after dropping Rupes off at pre-school and she pointed and said ‘that way.’ It really is the simple things, but I was amazed.
She’s also trying her hardest to copy both of us too. So, for example if she was looking for Rupert she’d say ‘Oopert, whey are oo?’ Gobbledegook, right? But to my ears she’s asking ‘Rupert, where are you?’ Same as when she says, ‘See you oon.’
I know she’s getting there and I’m going to rue the day she learns to speak back like her brother does, but I can’t wait for her to learn even more new words and pronounce them properly. I just know she’s going to be a happy little chatterbox and be able to wrap me even further round her finger than she currently does.
Either that or she’ll be like Rupert and pronounce things funny like when he mistakes the ‘st’ sound as a ‘d’. Awkward when he announces that he’s found ‘Daddy’s stick’ on a walk.
