People are always fascinated with red headed people. If a child has red hair then people are likely to ask them the question “Where did you get that red hair?” A neighbor of ours mentioned that one red headed child in their family was coached to reply: “That was all they had left.”

Madeline has been providing some interesting advances in her quest to evolve into a fully functioning human being. The first thing that I found was when I asked her what sound the sheep made she said “Bah Bah Bah”. She doesn’t have a need for much more than one consonant at time given that her vocabulary for speaking is about two words even if I include the “bah bah” as being the sound a sheep makes rather than a random coincidence. Most of what she says is a consonant followed by “Ah”. So she can say lah, lah, lah or nah, nah, nah (which we believe means hungry OR banana). The one exception is the word for cat which is just KKKKCHHHHCHHH. I was hoping to teach her to combine the word for cat with her la la stuff to say challah but upon asking her on a following day what sound a sheep made she looked at me with a blank stare.

The more important thing isn’t that she can speak some incomprehensible babble but that she can demonstrate basic comprehension of what we are saying and the world around her. Sarah showed this to me last night when she offered me the treat of watching the game – find that word. So Sarah would say – “Where is the fish” and Madeline would reach among the objects in her tray and grab a goldfish cracker. Then she would say “Where are your shoes?” and she would look down at her shoes. Or best of all “Where is daddy?” and she would look at me and smile.

Madeline also made the sign for a duck when looking at a duck picture. So we need to stop swearing and start realizing that our daughter is no longer likely to be even in a competition with a slime mold with regards to listening comprehension. It’s another exciting time. Everything in Madeline’s development is not going linear but instead going exponential right now. She is about to walk. She can express things. She can learn things. It’s just awesome.

We also bought a laser pointer for the cat who is unable to determine that it is an inanimate object. I can trick her into believing that the laser dot is hiding under the bed. This is probably the point in evolution where the baby starts to get payback for such slow development over the kitten and can become the master of her little world.