What am I doing right now?

It might sound like an odd way to spend my time, but I love updating Maia's dictionary! We keep a little notebook full of her words and phrases, and I really enjoy taking a couple of moments every day to add words into its pages. I'd hazard a guess that this habit of mine is persisting because of my decades-long (wow! I'm old!) interest in language in general, and my newer interest in language development in children. I just love how Maia's emphasis shifts from one category of words, one phoneme, one phrase structure to the next.

As of today, she has 176 words in her dictionary. It seems that she's moving on to thinking about colors and numbers these days, and also focusing on the /k/ sound. The following few words have recently obtained a distinct final /k/: walk, duck, truck, and milk. She correctly identifies blue, green and red things now (much of the time, but not always), and says the numbers "two" and "three," although she might not use those accurately.

Here's how her language has progressed over the months:

• By 12 months, she was using 12 words (verbal and signs), including "Mama" and "Dada" (which, apparently, speech/language experts don't really count like other words when it comes to infant/toddler speech. Interesting.)
• By 13 months, she had about 30
• 14 months, about 50
• 15 months, about 65
• 16 months, about 100
• 17 months, about 130
• 18 months (well, as of today), 176