Talk to Me

All of a sudden, Olivia has turned a huge corner with her speech. She's been doing pretty well for quite a while now, but almost over the period of just a couple of weeks, there's been a massive improvement in her vocabulary and confidence and now she's speaking in full sentences a lot of the time. They're not always grammatically correct, of course, but they do have subject and verb and she can readily communicate whatever it is she wants to say (frequently, 'Go 'way, Daddy. I do it.')

What's also been quite dramatic has been how much calmer she's become. Now she can express herself, she no longer gets frustrated to the same extent she did before. It wasn't unknown for Olivia to attempt to bite you or pinch you if she wasn't getting her own way over something. Now she is able to express her disappointment more constructively and seems less inclined to resort to communicating her views physically. It's made a massive difference knowing that we're able to reason with her.

Another thing that's come with the new language is singing. It's now quite commonplace for her to be singing to herself. Particular favourites are 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', 'Incy Wincy Spider' and 'Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star', and she sings them all the way through. Unfortunately, due to the nature of nursery rhymes, she often finds it difficult to find the resolution of the tune, and we're quite used to the equivalent of a Grateful Dead extended jam nursery rhyme.