Yes, she did it today! Screech Monkey is among that class of children which are statistically challenged due to the influence of a multilingual environment. Therefore she has taken a lot longer to define her vocabulary. Only just within the last month has the words "Mommy" and "Daddy" actually been used regularly and she has finally started repeating words we say, even using them every day since. At the dinner table she knows to say "Ahhhh Done!" when she is done and wants to get down. She's learned the word "no" and uses it at every chance, even with a vigorous head-shake. She likes the word so much she even uses it when she really actually means yes. She's got the name of one of our friends down pat and calls him by his name when she sees him. To us, it's still a foreign name and we find it hard to really call somebody by this name, but we still summon up the strength to call him by name, Jelle (pronounced the Baltimorese way of saying yellow: yell-uh). No doubt about it, the kid even calls out her own name over and over again and we know she'll have no problem with her l's.
But today she shocked me with what I would consider a full sentence as we were walking down the diaper aisle of the grocery store. Faces of babies lined the shelves and she excitedly pointed in their direction and yelled out, "Een baby; kijk, hoor!" (A baby, look!) Yes, all in Dutch! She's even got their intonations down. "Hoor" (pronounced like "or") is added on to the end of a statement (ex. yes, no, go) to add an extra intonation of severity, anger, irony, or surety. I'm so proud of my little multilingual baby!
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