The Hump

I feel like I've done a lot of Blogging about Liam. Maybe because he seems to be the one doing the most changing lately. This week Liam hit "the hump" in language development. Sounds bad huh? "The Hump" is just this... when a child goes from being a first words user to being a combiner. (These are very technical terms that speech therapists use) A combiner is a child who uses more than two words in a sentence, or uses signs with appropriate words, more than two to form a sentence, in an act of communication. So this is how the week went, and I have to say I never noticed this big of a jump with either Elleory, (who started as a combiner, lots of words right away,) or Anders who has been slow to speak, yet very consistent in his progress. Back to Liam... On Wednesday I noticed that every thing that came out of Liam's mouth had a pronoun attached, "Liam's toy, Mama's juice, Mine blanket" etc... This is a great deal! Thursday, everything had a "NO!" attached to it, IE "NO! Liam's toy, No Liam's juice, mama's juice." This is all very incredible to me, but this is what it boils down to. We have come to the point were Liam notices and is VERY vocal about fairness. Last week, when Anders stole his toy we had tears but Liam went about his business and found something else. This past Wednesday came "the hump". The 'I'm going to scream AND use words when Anders takes my toy AND I'm going to cry and throw the fit as well. By the way, I want that toy back.' hump. Great language progression, fantastic communication! What this means for me, is more refereeing with Anders, more negotiating with Anders, more time-outing for Anders, yet on the other hand, easier communation with Liam at least. It's a strange balance. Anders of course has something to say about it..."freakin' kid!"