Showing posts with label cooing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooing. Show all posts

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Day 350: Looking Who's (Almost) Talking

Did you hear that? I thought I heard something. It sounded like a tiny voice straining to be heard. Atom is not only biting at the bit to put his legs to work but has been performing new vocal exercises lately.

We can't say he is totally talking yet but somewhere between Monday and Tuesday this week it started to sound like his dangling participles stopped dangling. His outbursts found inner meaning. His conjunctions found their function. His one syllable remarks have grew exponentially.

Language is definitely taking shape. He now puts multiple noises together when pointing at things and there definitely seems to be meaning behind his primitive clauses.

Atom's progress made me think of a recent bit of useless knowledge I came across. Prarie Dogs recently were found to actually be capable of complex communications with each other. What sounds like merely a bunch of chrips and barks to us is actually a rich and layered structured language. We simply can't hear it (or understand it). Even if we could understand it, we don't have the tonal spectrum to even hear it. Could it be that way with babies? They start out with cries, grunts, coos, clicks, pops and snorts (seemingly rudimentary communication tools) and then dummy themselves down to the English language?

English has an incredible amount of inconsistencies and plain stupid rules when you think about it. The multiple meanings the word desert(depending on what syllable you put the accent on), the use of an apostrophe, and I'm also talking about you "who/whom".

The language has gotten so out of control that hardly anyone seems to even speak it correctly anymore. Sorry Mom, "ain't" is so accepted that my spell check didn't even blink when I just used it.

But I digress.

I can only assume this isn't going to be the last time my son and I have a hard time understanding each other. But I know, as is the case now, that no matter how confusing language gets at least I am confident we will always "get each other".

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Day 40: Ceiling Fans

The last few days have brought on lots of changes in Atom's sleep patterns. Well at least we think so. He seems to be closer to a "schedule" but it is hard to tell. When I asked him if he felt like he was getting a hang of this sleep thing he made a sort of a "coo" sounding noise. I am taking that as a "not really, but that ceiling fan above your head sure looks interesting" statement.

He is having his good days and some bad ones but I think we are getting better at working on acute amounts of sleep so it is a wash.

Atom's latest thing is exercising his vocal chords while he is awaiting for sleep to overcome him. All sorts of strange noises flow from him. Some of the noises are funny, some are scary, and others are just curious. I have a feeling he is going to be a talker. Of course the other possibility is he simply has something important to say.

One of the most frustrating things is not being able to effectively communicate with him.  However effectively communicating is a skill that very few people ever master so maybe I should just focus on not standing under ceiling fans.