Breakneck Acceleration into Speech Country

Yes, it's been a while. No, I have no good excuse, except that Kenshin hasn't been doing a lot of progressing. Until the last few weeks.

Somehow, for whatever reason, the spoken word switch seems to have suddenly flicked on for Kenshin. He's now actively asking use to "read book" (or even more impressively "read Sandra Boynton"), "I think I want to watch [Wall-E, Bolt, I Spy]" and dozens of other sentence fragments and individual words. He says "look, plane!" or "look, noodle!" appropriately when pointing at those respective objects.

This really must sound like "yeah, so what?" territory for many parents of 30 month old kids, but for Kenshin to be speaking at this level (~24 months) is a big leap forward in a very short amount of time. For the past six months previous to this latest development spurt, Kenshin had been speaking around a year-old level, well behind his age. Fortunately, as mentioned in previous posts, developmental assessment indicated that he wasn't too far behind in other aspects.

He's beginning to talk without prompting, excitedly describing things he wants or has seen. This, paired with his increasing comprehension of our commands to him ("come upstairs", "let's brush your teeth", "time to change diaper", etc.) has made it a little easier to deal with him.

Strangely, as I say this, he's actually not generally troublesome in the sense that he's actively causing mischief - it's just that due to his slow comprehension of verbal commands, he's generally indifferent or ignorant of what we want him to do, which makes him seem very uncontrollable except by pulling him about or physically sitting him where he needs to be (on the couch, in his chair, in bed, and so on). He's not drawing on walls because he wants attention - he just doesn't know any better.

Daigoro, by contrast, was speaking fairly clearly at this point in his development, albeit still in sentence fragments.

We took them to African Lion Safari this past Labour Day weekend. Surprisingly better than I was expecting, though I have to say I thought the kids would be more interested in animals roaming just outside the car windows than they ended up being. Kenshin in particular was more interested in his toys than the baby zebra frolicking about four feet away.

Daigoro and I had an interesting duel of wills a month or two back - I need to document that, but not tonight. Just wanted to get a record in while I had a spare moment.

[edit] OK, I have a spare moment.

I was instructing Daigoro to do something - what exactly I can't remember.

I was getting frustrated and I said, "Daigoro, it makes me very angry when you don't listen to me. Please do what I say."

To which Daigoro replied, "Why do I have to do what you want when you don't listen to what I want?"

I replied (in a somewhat taken aback manner), "Daigoro, children have to to what their parents want so that they stay safe and learn from what their parents know. Sometimes children don't know the right things to do yet."

That seemed to fly, but I have to say I wasn't expecting the teenage rebellion angle for at least another eight years.