This has been a big month, developmentally speaking. Morgan is putting words (and signs) together more often, adding lots of new words to her vocabulary, and playing independently for longer periods of time. She has begun imaginative play, which I find very exciting. Possibly relatedly, she seems to be afraid of the dark now. She's not visibly scared, exactly, but she won't go into dark rooms. She likes to identify objects around the house by who uses them: She'll watch me fold laundry and identify each article of clothing as "Mommy", "Mama", or "Papa"; she points out the various bottles of shampoo in the shower by user; stuff like that. (The vacuum cleaner is "Papa".)
She's kind of lost interest in potty training but now she's very into washing her hands.
Particularly interesting new words:
other side (pronounced "ho-tai")
apogado ("off", but she uses it to mean "I want to play with the light switch")
Morgan's pronunciation is still in that phase where familiarity and context are needed to decipher it. Morgan got a bit distressed while we had friends over for dinner before Christmas, saying "kuh! kuh!" "Oh," said wild_irises , "She's saying 'cup'! Do you want your water?" But 'kuh' is not 'cup', 'kuh' is 'sock'. She was unhappy because one of her socks had fallen off.
The overlap in how different words are pronounced is sometimes funny. In Morgan-speak, cats say mouse, dogs say wolf, and cows say moose. The most overloaded syllable is probably "ba". Things "ba" can mean:
ball (including other round things like lamps and satellite dishes; not balloons, though -- those are "boo")
the sound a chicken makes
the sound a sheep makes
- Quick 17-month Update