Little Bug Talking!

Little Bug and some friends.

  A friend who remembers Little Bug's first two weeks of life in NICU said recently, as we were talking about Bug's articulation disorder: he's just a bulldozer. He doesn't let anything stop him.
  Bug would undoubtedly like the metaphor; bulldozers follow closely behind backhoes as his favorite things on earth.
  But I was thinking about that as I finally got to read his 24-month language assessment from the speech therapist: she rated his language skills as above average for his age. It's hard to remember that he was hardly talking at all at 20 months, 4 words and a lot of animal sounds. And hundreds of signs.
  But I realized today how much he was listening all those months. I was reading a book to him, and he correctly identified all sorts of things I didn't know he had words for.
  "That sailboat."
  "Motorboat."
  "Rowboat."
  I turned the page. He did it again. "Oars, propeller, lighthouse."
  "Wow, little guy, you sure know a lot of words."
  "Little Bug talking!" he said, all proud.
  He wasn't just talking. He had a meta-narrative about this whole process, a name for this as a developmental stage in contrast with a previous one. Talking. And, I suspect, he'd also been listening all those months when he wasn't to the conversations about him not talking. I guess this was his announcement that we are done with all that.
  Then he added, "Little bug sitting on ottoman."
  Show off.