Mommy Mondays: Talking Troubles

Having a child is like entering a giant competition with no rules.  You have no idea what you're supposed to do, so you look around and try to do what everyone else is doing.  Except, childhood does not follow a cookie cutter outline.  So you spend most of your time worrying why your child isn't doing what everyone else's children are doing.

It starts early on - with sleep.  The Actress texted me this week because everyone is making her feel that her 2 week old may be waking too often.  She asked if Thatbaby was a good sleeper at that age.  "No baby is a good sleeper at 2 weeks old" I told her.  "People just don't remember."

From then on it's a race to make sure your baby is the first to roll, to crawl, to walk, to talk, to write their dissertation.

At 2, the constant discussion revolves around speech and vocabulary.  Just last week at Girls' Night Out with my friends we got into a discussion about speech therapy and our children. And my perspective is - this is one of those areas where there is a wide range of normal involving speech.

I remember early on not being able to wait until Thatbaby could communicate.  Counting down until he could say "mama" (oh if I had only known how that would turn into his constant cry of Momma-mommy-mama-mama-mommy.)

I tend to think Thatbaby is smack dab in the middle of all things developmentally related. And I base that on - comparing to the people around us.  And me.  The family lore is that I was speaking full sentences by 18 months, before I even had teeth.  Thatbaby wasn't.   And that never concerned me.  Some of my friends with slightly older children had 1 year olds who perfectly annunciated words like "apple" and "crusher."  Thatboy couldn't.  And that never concerned me.   It didn't concern me, because I had friends at the other end of the vocabulary spectrum also.  A friend with a child who barely had 3 words at 18 months.  A friend with a child who is about to be two and isn't putting together sentences yet.  But all children develop at their own pace, and speech is included in that.

I love that Thatbaby can communicate, because it does cut down on his own frustrations, but that doesn't mean we can always understand him.  He still has his moments where we have no idea what he's talking about.  And he still mispronounces words and has some speech idiosyncrasies.  Such as using -sh instead of -s at the end of words.  But you know what?  He's 2 years old.  I think that's pretty par for the course.