December has been a busy month with Christmas and everything so I just haven´t had much time to blog. Chloe has not long turned 19 months old and her language and speaking is coming on in leaps and bounds. Although she is still babbling loads and uttering gibberish, it is clear that she is definitely trying to communicate with us and get something across to us. She also points to things or pats the chair etc to let us know what she wants to sit down on the chair or that she wants something.
What I´ve noticed is that she seems to say certain words in one of her languages and other words in the second language as if whichever word is "easier" in one language,then that´s the word she´ll use. I don´t know if I´ve explained myself very well. For example, she says "ball" in English,but has never said anything that remotely sounds like "pelota" in Spanish and my theory is because the English word is shorter and therefore "easier". Apart from the words that she started saying when she 16-17months old listed in this post, her vocabulary has increased to include "cheese"(although she doesn´t say it correctly),teeth (which sounds very much like cheese and is sometimes hard to distinguish whether she´s actually saying cheese or teeth), pa(n) which is sometimes "pan" for bread or "patatas" for crisps, caca for ColaCao(a Spanish chocolate drink) and I think she´s just starting to say it to mean poo too, "Winnie the Pooh"(although she pronounces Pooh like "po"! and "Peppa" although it sounds more like "Papa",do(dos-she can´t pronounce the -s very well yet!) and tries to count with us..."wa-wa" for water...my parents actually thought that it sounded like she´d kind of mixed up both words "water" and "agua" and come up with a Spanglish word "wagwa". She also knows to say "pooh" when something is smelly for example for a joke I smell her feet and say pooh as it makes her laugh and she sometimes puts her feet underneath my nose after a bath or when I´m changing her and says "Pooh!". I have another cute story about this which I´m saving for another post!She also says "nigh-nigh(night night!) which is really cute too!She repeats words or phrases more and more frequently.The other day my mum said something about her being beautiful and my husband said" Of course" and she repeated "Of course" and we just cracked up, then because we were laughing she repeated it a few more times!
She also says the pronoun "tu" and is starting to string words together to form short sentences e.g. "allí", "allí está!", ¿Dondé está?".She understands everything we say 100% and will follow orders such as "Put it in the bin" or "Sit down" and can point to parts of her body if we say "Where´s your nose?" ¿Dondé esta tu nariz?, Where´s your head?/ ¿Donde esta tu cabeza? in both languages. We have kept up with reading in both languages and sometimes she likes to turn the pages and babbles away as if she is "reading" us the story! We do a lot of pointing to the pictures and saying things like "Where´s the red balloon?" etc in both languages and then she points to it.Sometimes we are really surprized at words that she knows or understands!One of her favourite books for this "game" at the moment is "What the Ladybird Heard" by Julia Donaldson, as you have to spot the glittery ladybird on each page!
I´ve also been singing nursery rhymes a lot to her as usual, all the songs I´ve mentioned on previous posts plus One, Two ,Three, Four ,Five, Once I caught a fish alive and "She´ll Be Coming Round the Mountain".It is very exciting seeing how she is acquiring languange and developing both language skills.She´ll be chattering away nineteen to the dozen in no time!!
