Baby Talk

David has made giant strides with his speech in the last year, but he still is far from the typical five-year-old. I can understand much of what he says, but it sounds a lot like baby talk. Last year at this time, he really had very few words, so we are extremely thankful for his progress and as long as he keeps progressing, I really do not care how far behind he is.

Of course, I always try to model the correct pronunciation of a word, but there are a few words that he says that make me smile every time and I must admit that I will be a little sad when he is able to pronounce them correctly. He does have a unique name for every member of our family; mine, for example, is Mom Mom. He calls his brother An-roo, which is too cute. Perhaps my favorite, however, is that fact that he has recently changed his name for my nephew Thomas. He has had a great deal of difficulty with his full name, so we encouraged David to just call him T, which he did for a long time. Just in the past few months, though, he has altered his name to Tommy. No one else calls him Tommy and no one else would probably be allowed to refer to the 5 foot 10 inch, 13 year-old that way. But when David says it to Thomas, he just smiles.

I have a few other favorites. Every morning when he gets up, I ask him if he had a good sleep, to which he always replies, "a good peep." Each night, when I tuck him in and tell him I love him, he always answers, "Woo-hoo, too."

One of David's favorite characters is SpongeBob Squarepants. He doesn't really watch the show too much, but he has a SpongeBob game that he loves to play. Originally, he called him something that sounded like "Uh-nob" which eventually evolved into "Buh-bob" and then the last name was added "Peepants." SpongeBob Peepants. Have you ever looked at SpongeBob's silly grin? Maybe in this case David's mispronunciation is really more like a theory.