Magdalena said Apa!

Here is a video and a few photos of Magdalena with my dad, her Apa (pron AH-PA).  She really, truly, did say Apa on Sunday July 26!  Dad says she was saying it before that, but this is when I captured it on video.  She was 9.5 months.

This is not her first word, though.  She did look straight at Alex and said "Dada" around 8 months.  And she has said "Mama," though I don't think she meant me at that point.  But she has also said "Dog."  She looks at this little stuffed dog and says "Dah, Dah."  She is just missing that last "g" sound, but she'll get it.

Thanks to friends for loaning me the book Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, which describes the best way to get kids to talk. To quote the linked WSJ review above, "In a famous 1994 study described by the authors, ­researchers discovered that babies of professional ­parents were exposed to almost three times the ­number of words as the babies of welfare parents. ­Parents took to buying $699 "verbal pedometers," a gadget that counts the number of words their baby is hearing per hour. Now experts are modifying the ­earlier findings. Turns out that it's not so much the number of words kids hear that matters but the responsiveness of adults to a child's words and explorations. Shocked? I doubt it."

At any rate, I am now trying to say words to Magdalena in response to her efforts at speaking. Not sure if this will get us anywhere, or if it is even drastically different from what we did with Lucia, but Lucia is a fairly articulate not-quite-three-year-old, and has an amazing vocabulary. Hopefully Magdalena will follow in her big sister's footsteps.


Magdalena and Apa talking together:

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Magdalena saying Apa!


Token Lucia picture - she got herself into the double stroller in the garage. When I asked her to smile for the camera, this was the result she produced:

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