Life With the Ladniers: What's This?

This is Ayden's new favorite phrase. All day long he is asking, "What's this? What's this? What's this?" (though it sounds more like, "Wasis?") He even asks us to tell him the names of the same things over and over by asking us this question and we answer him every time as if it is the first time he has ever asked. We love it! We can see the wheels turning as he processes the sounds. Sometimes he'll give a word a try, seeing how it feels in his mouth and other times he just moves on or even says, "Oh..." He is mimicking us more than ever before and is starting to string words together into broken two and three word utterances. Tonight while we were sliding on his new (to him) slide he slid really fast. He said, "fast slide! Slide fast!"

It is normal for a child's receptive communication skills (how well they understand what you say to them) to be more advanced than their expressive by we are noticing that Ayden is pretty much understanding everything we say to him these days. We can ask him to clean something up, bring us something, go get something, etc and he will do it without hesitation most of the time. I have to say that this new having cute conversations together thing, as basic as they are, is a whole lot of fun. I suppose this new repetitive "What's this?" questioning is preparing us for the "Why's" we'll be answering before we know it!