Louder is the same as better

Bragging time:

Most places will tell you that kids Elliot's age will have a vocabulary of 10-50 words. I've been writing down all of Elliot's words that I consider to be truly in his vocabulary, as in he understands their meaning and actively, spontaneously uses the words to communicate with no prompting on our part. So this excludes all of the words he imitates or uses with prompting (like "Love you," which he only says when we say "I love you") and all of the words he understands when we say them but does not say himself, which are plentiful. So far I've counted 123. I know there are 4 or 5 more I thought of today that I haven't put on the list yet, and I'm sure I'm missing more. This is also excluding all of his sound effects (which are pretty numerous, but I've listed about 25 so far) and letters (he knows all 26 quite solidly now, and really they should count as vocabulary, since it's basically shape recognition) and numbers (he knows 1-9 perfectly, but he still calls zero, "o"). All together, I'm guessing he has about a 200 word vocabulary. Does he pronounce them all perfectly? Not at all - he still needs a lot of work on that, though he's really understandable for such a little guy. He's using several different 2-3 word combinations now, though he sometimes gets them mixed up ("help please" has become the abbreviated "heppy," and "up please down," because he still gets up and down mixed up. My favorites are "baby toot"[cute] and "mo' bobots [robots] peeze?").

Some of the more unusual and endearing words in his repertoire:

- hearing aid (right now he calls all ears hearing aids, although he knows the word "ear")
- squeegee
- cantaloupe (which he pronounces "pope-pope")
- Spiderman and Batman
- temple, Jesus, church, and amen
- carrot (he always adds an extra syllable or two ["cadadadat"], which seems counterintuitive)
- puzzle (you just have to hear the way he says it. Adorable)
- sloth and otter (these are from a book he has)

He also writes! Or at least today he drew a straight line with a crayon, pointed at it excitedly, and said, "I!" That one was accidental, but he's been doing it on purpose since then.

He also helps us sing the alphabet. When we sing a phrase we leave off the last letter and he fills it in (as in we sing, "T, U..." and he says, "V!").

In other child news, my gorgeous little girl giggled this week. I didn't get to hear it, but Andy was tickling her feet on his beard, and apparently she giggled. Gets 'em every time.

My kids are my favorite.