Communicative Utterances

By now on the What to Expect forum for March 2012 babies (which I still read more often than necessary) people are all sharing everything their babies can do.  Of course, everyone's baby can walk and talk and dress themselves and drive to the mall and paint masterpieces and compose poetry.  Seriously, this is pretty minimal exaggeration on my part and ridiculous extrapolation on theirs.

I'm cool with PDG not walking yet.  He is totally uninterested.  Cruising? Sure.  That's old news.  Letting go to stand on his own?  Nah.  Pushing a push-toy?  If he's in the mood for it.  Eating, though?  Yes.  Now.  Always.

But he's started dropping things from his high chair.  Usually because he is so excited to eat that he goes a little nuts.  (I do feed him, and often, I swear).  Sometimes it's because he's mad that all that's on his tray is his sippy cup and he wants something solid.  So, naturally, over the edge goes the sippy.

This is almost immediately followed by me saying "uh-oh."

And then, a couple days ago, I swore he said it.  J-Man heard it too, but figured it was coincidence.

The next night, down went a piece of carrot, and out came the cutest "uh oh."  J-Man wasn't there, and told me I was joining the lying ladies of the forum.

But with our joint joke of a snow day yesterday, it was confirmed, PDG can say "uh-oh."

What isn't confirmed - are we ok with that being our child's first official word?  Is it even a word?

We got to talking, deep language/linguistic stuff here, and are choosing to call it a communicative utterance.  We're still holding out for the dadadada to actually become "dada" or maybe "ball" or "socks" or other words that we certainly repeat enough to sink in by now.

But until then, we'll enjoy the uh-oh sounds, and try not to flip out when he drops his cup and complains that he cannot simply eat every second of every day.