Bye bye frog

It's amazing how much a kid's brain will retain. We had no idea how much information was sinking in with Brody until he started talking. As I said in an earlier post, Brody was a late talker. At his 15 month checkup Brody wasn't using a single word consistently and the doctor asked us to have him evaluated for a speech delay. Jacob and I decided to wait and see how he was doing at 18 months, knowing Brody is slow to start new skills but then catches up quickly. At 16 months he started using Dada consistently for Jacob (previously Dada meant everyone, including strangers and dogs), which was quickly followed by Mama and bye bye. By 18 months he had approximately 30 words and at 2 years Brody was stringing together 3-4 words and knew the difference between a pentagon and an octagon.

Over the summer of 2008 when Brody was just over a year old we had a frog that lived under our gutter output. Whenever I was watering the lawn, Brody would come with me and I'd show him the frog. He never initiated the trip to see the frog and I wasn't sure he even cared about it. As Brody began talking, the weather turned colder and our frog disappeared. Months had passed since we'd last seen him and I'd stopped checking. One day over the winter as I was loading Brody into the car to go to daycare, he randomly said "no more frog." I let him walk over to the gutter spout and he lifted up the drain plate, saying "bye bye frog". Little things like this are great, not only to see Brody communicating but also to see how our actions over the past two years have made an impression on him. He's retaining information that we didn't even know he understood. He's also quietly remining us that his brain is a sponge and we really need to be watching what we say and do in front of him.