New & Improved Communication Skills

In the past couple of weeks, Luke's talking has started to take off. He has many, many more words -- he knows all the colors, for example, but sometimes his articulation of certain words is way off the mark. Just in the past week he's started to put together a subject and verb -- usually "Mommy do," as in something that he wants me to do. Yesterday at the playground Luke and I took turns going down a slide. When he switched his approach to going down on his belly, he said, "Mommy do." Tonight he gave me a bracelet and instructed, "Mommy wear." Other two-word combinations include "back on," as in he wants the light in his room back on, and "big" with just about anything -- "big truck," "big poop," "big book." He now says "book" correctly, with the "k" at the end of the word. Ken has heard Luke say his name correctly, but to date, I've heard Luke say only "Lu" when asked his name.

Bryn, meanwhile, is beginning to draw stick figures,
and she's interested in writing words, so long as they begin with the letter "H," including "hi," "hit," and "hot." Letters with an arc, including "B" and "R," seem particularly daunting, so she hasn't attempted writing her name.

At school her entire class drew self-portraits with a permanent black marker and then painted them in with water colors. It's fascinating to look at the range of her class; a couple were very sophisticated -- figures wearing skirts or hair in a pony tail, and at the other end of the spectrum, some were mere scribbles. Bryn's stick figure lies somewhere in the middle but is still frame-worthy.