The Survival Guide for Rookie Moms

I love it that my two-year-old son talks such nonsense. We have lengthy conversations each morning where he rambles on and I try to keep up. A conversation may start something like “Dac buk errr mama get it” and I’ll frown and try “You want mama to get your cat book?” and he’ll repeat his request and I’ll take another stab…It’s highly entertaining and as long as I don’t really need to know what he’s going on about we’re fine. He’s sitting there now ‘reading’ himself a Thomas book “ooh go or dok err”. I started trying to list and count his vocabulary to see how far behind he was, but quite frankly after noting 20 words I got confused and lost track. Should I count a word such as ‘Dac’ which I know is a very badly pronounced ‘Cat’?

But I’m not concerned about my son, he’ll get there in the end – my kids are just late talkers. But as a rookie mom first time around with my daughter I was worried about her slow speech. At 20 months she used the word ‘Na’ for no less than six things, ‘Blanket’ being one of them. She had a strange habit of taking the middle of a word, reversing it and using it – so ‘nu’ was her word for bunny. We thought she’d never talk. And without the aid of a crystal ball to see us here five years later constantly telling her to stop chuntering on because she does not stop talking, I panicked and requested speech therapy. We were very lucky that the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority offered excellent speech and language services. After the initial tests we were relieved to hear that her comprehension was in the 95^th percentile. However, her speech for her age was only in the 5^th percentile and she was signed up for weekly therapy sessions. These she thoroughly enjoyed as they were essentially a one-on-one play date with someone other than mommy with lots of new and exciting games, crafts and books into the bargain.

As the weeks went on she made good progress and we were soon down to a few sounds that were harder to master. The therapist’s suggestion to help with the ‘F’ sound was to pretend to have bunny teeth and say “Fffff”, “Fffff”. We even made bunny ears to help with the game. Once she was able to pronounce the sound, the next step was to encourage her to use ‘F’ for words where she had got into the habit of substituting an easier sound, e.g. instead of saying ‘nish’ she should try ‘fish’; try ‘finger’ instead of ‘binger’. So whenever she said a word incorrectly, I would correct her and remind her to use the newly learned ‘F’. Then one day she was trying to say ‘dark’ but pronouncing it ‘duck’. “No that’s not right honey, it’s not duck….” I began. Assuming I was once again harping on about the use of ‘F’, she then put great effort into making her bunny teeth and replacing the initial D with an F before loudly and proudly proclaiming “*UCK”.

After the initial shock, copious snickering and rapid backpedaling I had to admit I was relieved (and a little surprised) that her first curse word didn’t come from mimicking an outburst from me or her father, or from overhearing bad language on an irresponsibly aired TV program. But really, speech therapy?

Filed under: Baby Tagged: | Baby, Cursing, Family, learning to talk, Motherhood, Parenting, speech therapy, Swearing, toddler