Music to my ears

That is what I was hearing - my little girl, chattering away. As I started typing this blog, Sophie was playing with her dollhouse and singing a song to her baby. Although just gibberish, it was the sweetest song ever. Love it!

Anyway, I have much to update! Sophie has had quite the language explosion in the last month or so and I am excited to report that she is saying over 20 words! Can you believe it?! I feel like she learns a new word almost every single day. This is the current list of words/phrases that she says spontaneously:

ball                  hot dog
baby                all done
ma-ma             water
book                bear
uh-oh               bubble
eye                   more
bye-bye           owl
flower              girl
waffle              balloon
up                    da-da
open                choo-choo

So, I admittedly went a little crazy with the video camera last night. Just warning you! :)

Here I am trying to get her to say a couple of words:

It is getting harder and harder to capture anything on video nowadays! Below, we are going over her body parts. She will hardly sit still for this anymore:

Sophie's receptive language is also growing rapidly. I don't have a current list, but the last time I counted she had over 120 nouns that she can easily identify. The video below is pretty lengthy, but it is a good indicator some of the crazy words she knows. Also, notice how she follows directions when Jared asks her to turn the page:

Jared bought this book for Sophie a couple of months ago and I thought he was crazy. I was sure it would be way too complex for her to identify the animals since there are several to choose from on each page. He just had to prove me wrong, though! It is pretty amazing to see Sophie identify animals such as a flamingo and chameleon, so I'm not complaining. ;)

With Sophie's vocabulary growing so quickly, we are primarily focusing on noun/noun or noun/verb combinations now. For example, while playing, I will ask Sophie to put the baby on the toilet or make the duck fall down. This way, she has to identify the noun(s) I am talking about and take the appropriate action. Just a few minutes ago, while in the office trying to type this blog, Sophie was growing restless playing with her dollhouse. I asked her to get a book from her room and bring it to Mommy. I had to repeat it twice, but she walked into her room, emerged with a book, and brought it into the room I was in. Incredible.

It's hard to believe that a baby who is not even 15 months old is able to follow directions like that, much less a baby that is profoundly deaf. It's things like this that I have to remember when I have a bad day and get down about her hearing loss. I have to remember that it could be so much worse and we are extremely lucky. Oh yeah, and this sweet little face works pretty well too: