Over the past few weeks, Elianna - who just turned 15 months old - had been wanting to know what everything is called. She points at things nearby and across the room, pokes body parts and facial features, and prods every piece of food on her plate until she's told what it is.
While poking at every little carrot nibble on her plate does make for longer meal time, sometimes she also makes a sound. I'm not 100% sure how much she's trying to duplicate the sounds, given that her linguistic ability is still somewhat limited (to date, she regularly makes m, b, d, sounds and occasionally v, w, l, y, as well as ah, eh, and a sounds). The other day I gave her some blueberries and she repeated "bah!" Similarly, she repeated a "m" sound when offered mangoes... but the, she does that when given banana, too. (I personally think she's trying to say "nana" but hasn't quite mastered the "n" yet.)
One of the few words that she says regularly, and consistently the same way, is "Ah-ah," which is what she calls Athena.
She HAS started gesturing to herself - smacking her hand proudly against her chest and then grinning from ear to ear when I cover her chest and hand with my own and announce "Elianna!" She loves hearing her name, and I'm pretty sure she knows it means her.
Sometimes I get annoyed at all the pointing, at how much it derails mealtime - sometimes I think she's trying to distract me*, like I'll forget to give her more chicken (or whatever food she has decided she doesn't want to eat that day).
*Is this karma coming back at me for all the times I tried to get my Russian professor off-topic to get out of a quiz?
But then I remember that she's learning. Even though she's been told everything on her plate two or three times, been told what the window and the ipod are so many times, keeps gesturing to Athena (also crunching and munching) in the kitchen. She knows that all these things have names and she likes to hear them.
And I also remember that she can hear me say these things, that she can see things to point to and ask what they are. I remember that at 19 months old, Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing to an illness. Only barely able to say a few words, the only one that she remembered years later when Anne Sullivan came to teach her, to break through into her dark world, was "wa-wa" - water. (And as anyone who saw the movie remembers because depending on when and where you saw it, it was either an inspirational climax or, if you were like me and watched it in middle school with a bunch of hooting boys who thought this was the funniest thing they'd ever seen...)
Elianna is very close to saying "wa-wa." She has a sippy cup for water, and pokes at it all the time while I patiently tell her for the 14th time "water," (or "milk," or "juice"). And some nights when I sit in the recliner in the dark, rocking her at bedtime while she points to the stuffed animals on the shelves, the shadows thrown by her clock, I think about how lucky I am that I don't have to worry that a fever at 19 months will take away my ability to teach my baby words.