Gato Gato

At 16 months and Sofía doesn’t have a whole lot of words that she says especially if I compare her to her friend Marnix who says a plethora of words. He has too many words for his parents to even count. Sofía will often repeat words that I say, but I don’t really count that as speaking because she isn’t producing language, she is imitating sound. Imitating sound isn’t all that bad, and although important, I can’t really jump for joy that she is “saying” whatever the word is. Right now, her words include: Gato, Nacho, Papi, papa, stinky, nite-nite, galleta, caja, mami, mini-mi (ha ha, I taught her that because she is soooo a Mini version of Me!), gafas, agua, good girl, gracias (only a few times), there may be a few more, but I can’t remember them now. It is interesting because she has signs for almost all these words as well, but will either say the word or use the sign, but never both. Until today that is. Today, we were reading a book and I pointed to the cat and asked her, “Qué es este?”, and she replied, “Gato” and signed gato at the same time. (En Español, “gato” also means the jack you use to lift the car while changing a flat tire!)