Milk milk milk milk milk milk milk

Happy 2011 to you all. If things go as the alarmists, conspiracy theorists, and religious fanatics world-wide would have us believe, we have less than two years left on this planet. So live life for today, and make every moment count! Even if the world doesn't end on 12/21/12, those are still good mottos to live by.

If you haven't figured out from the title of this post, Del's absolute favorite sign is MILK! But before I go into more detail about that, let me talk a little about her vocal babbling, as it has taken an amusing turn lately and I haven't written about her English language in a bit.

Babbling is Funny!
At nine months and a chunk of change, Del is everywhere all at once. She crawls so fast it seems impossible, the slap-slap-slap of her hands on our wooden floors beating out a rapid cadence as I track her down once again behind the door, the corner, the table. She pants a manic kind of baby laugh as she crawls, so delighted is she in her sheer speed and constantly progressing mobility. She also pulls up to stand on everything, as she is a very (very!) tall baby and can reach even the seat of our tall kitchen stools and the third shelf of our pantry, eek! I have replaced what I can with items that are Del friendly, but we are quickly outgrowing our apartment and Del has me running in circles around our three cozy rooms, doing my best to help her avoid catastrophe.

Her babbling is changing as rapidly as her physical ability. She now talks to herself in almost conversation-like intonation, with lots of /v/ (as in "van") and /sf/ (as in. . .wait, that's not an English phoneme!) sounds starting her typical consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. Her favorite time to really let loose vocally is when she is very tired and on the verge of sleeping, which means that I am inches away from her face as I am typically nursing her at this point. What tends to happen is this: her eyelids grow heavy and she stops eating to (presumably) pull away and fall asleep. Then she begins to serenade herself with any manner of ridiculous and fun sounds, growing louder and louder as she gets closer to sleep and her eyes grow more and more closed. This amuses me to no end, and I try my best to stifle laughter, which results in me shaking noiselessly as I suppress my giggles. My shaking, in turn, piques Del's curiosity, and she looks me square in the eye as she continues her soliloquy. Knowing she is looking at me, I dare not look at her, and I do my best to keep my eyes closed and feign sleep. But that Del is no stupid baby, and she knows Mama is awake under those eyelids. This is when the smacking, poking, and pulling begin. A little game of, "let's see how much she'll let me get away with before she admits she's still awake!" Needless to say, it's a hilarious situation that I know I will look back on and miss sorely. The only regret I have is that I never remember to bring the video or tape recorder to bed with us, so I have yet to capture this magical vocal play that I am so fortunate to be regaled with.

As far as I can remember (I'm not taking the meticulous linguistic notes I once promised myself), Del has added /v/, /s/ (as in "sun"), /p/ (as in "pun"), /f/ (as in "fun") and the occasional /t/ (as in "ton") to her list of sounds she plays around with. There are lots of other little sounds in there, and I will make it a point to take a sampling of her babbling sometime soon to share more accurately what she's been doing with her vocal cords and articulators lately. In addition to new consonant sounds, Del has really been enjoying playing with the pitch of her voice, or how high or low it is. She likes to lay her head alongside mine and hold an open /a/ (as in "hot") sound, which I then try to match. Then she goes up and down in pitch, waiting for me to match her in pitch before she moves on to the next one. I believe this is her way of exploring intonation, or the rise and fall of pitch that we utilize in speech to distinguish words from one-another and denote emotion, among other things.

But enough about that, we have a new video, hooray! The computer hell that Daddy F and I have been dealing with the last few months is finally over and we have an updated, shiny, quick and fantastic machine that (gasp!) has enough free space on it for me to edit videos with, whee! In addition to the sign MILK seen in the video, Del has added the letter "D" to her handshapes and has adapted her way of signing CHANGE (palms together with a turn of the wrists) and BANANA (pointed finger of one hand pressed repeatedly into the open palm of her other hand). We don't know yet what D means, but she signs it frequently and has for almost a week now, so sooner or later we'll figure it out, and by that time it will likely morph into something else that we will take another week or so to recognize. Oh my, but this language stuff is tricky (and fun!).