Up!

My eyes widened and I looked up in astonishment.   Did my son really just talk?  To me?  Did I actually hear him or was it all just a figment of my imagination?  But there he was, standing in front of me with a look of expectancy in his eyes.  So I picked him up, hugged him tight, and took a minute for excessive cheering despite the fact that I had just put him into his pack-n'-play to play while I fed his little brother.

Those two little letters have never before sounded so beautiful to my ears.

Fast forward one week and it happened again...

We were playing with Mr. Potato Head and had just pulled out the eyes to put into the potato when Zach came running downstairs to talk to me.  As I turned to face him, I heard a sweet little voice behind me saying "aaahhs".  Assuming it couldn't be true, I swung my head back around to find my boy closely inspecting and poking at Mr. Potato Head's eyes.  Again, cheering ensued as Mommy and big brother celebrated with much praise.

While these may seem like very small baby steps toward speaking, they are big steps for Wesley.  He is learning to communicate without prompting, and he is slowly figuring out the motor plan for putting a consonant after a vowel in a word rather than just speaking the first consonant with an "ah" sound after it.  As well, he is beginning to breathe before speaking which allows him to hold out a vowel for longer than a millisecond.

Speaking is hard work, but we're getting there - one step at a time.