Words, Real Words!

Admittedly still few and far between, Adik’s communication is starting to sound more and more like real words. Just the other day, we were going up the stairs to my room looking for Daddy and I asked him to call Daddy and he shouted, “Daa-deee! Daa-deee!” Daddy said he thought it was Abang calling him!

Having said that, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions are still answered by Adik with a very emphatic nod for ‘yes’ and a vigorous shake of the head for ‘no’. He must have some pretty strong neck muscles by now. Very useful for a future jock.

After some months of trial and error (on his part), he has the nod and shake down pat. His nods really do mean ‘yes please’ and when he shakes his head he’s quite sure ‘hell, no’. If we suspect he’s hungry and we ask him, “Adik, are you hungry?” he might not just nod but walk to and try to climb up his highchair. On a good day, he would wait there patiently while we get his food. Other days he might just climb up onto our regular dining chair, grab a fork and start stabbing some food and feeding himself.

If he’s sleepy and I ask him if he’d like to go upstairs with me to sleep, he’d answer with a nod then proceed to wave bye-bye to everyone around him, which is his way of saying “goodnight”.

Lately he has been playing with his belly button, saying, “Ay-yay-yay-yay” while pointing to it. That could be because when Abang was very young, Daddy used to amuse him by making faces using his belly button, saying, “Wa-wa wa! Wa-wa-wa!” So much so that Abang would refer to a belly button as “wa-wa-wa”. So now it’s Adik’s turn, except that the “w” sound is still a bit tough for him.

Adik is a HUGE fan of Thomas the Tank Engine and absolutely loves watching it on CD. One of the characters, Gordon, loves to say, "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" when he pulls the express train. At this point Adik will yell out, "Ay-yee, ay-yee, ay-yee!" in the same intonation as Gordon. So he's getting there, slowly but surely.

Just today, we were in the car and I was telling him that we were on the way to Nenek’s house. About 10 minutes later, I asked him, “Adik, where are we going? Whose house are we going to, Adik?”

“Ne-nek. Ne-nek!” came a very confident reply. He speaks!