Raccoons and Sentences

Our lives have been pretty "normal" lately, which is awesome. The kids are doing really well and Penelope is still a sweet, easy baby. About the most excitement lately is that, this week, the raccoon from earlier this year made another appearance, this time to the front of the house where we now keep the cat food. Our nanny told us that the other day Piper was standing at the front door, looking outside, and knocking on the door trying to get the racoon's attention. Piper was pretty excited about the raccoon. Henry and Rosemary, however, refused to even walk into the foyer. Apparently they were a little scared of the raccoon.

The kids have been in speech therapy for a while, and for the last couple of months have been in Children's Hospital's Early Intervention program for speech therapy. The kids are doing so much better with their speech -- especially the last few weeks. They also started playschool in early September, and I'm sure that helps with the kids' speech as well. Finally, just in the last month, they call Gary "Daddy" (or more accurately "Dadeeeeeee") and I'm "Mommy" (or for Henry, "Ma"). They have tons of words and try to imitate all sorts of words, so now our goal is to get them speaking two-word phrases and sentences. We've seen a little progress on that front, but we saw more progress than I ever expected this past weekend.

On Saturday, Gary was taking the kids upstairs for their baths, and Piper came up to me and said, "Bye." I told her bye, then asked her where she was going. Her response: "I going bath."

I don't think that I've ever heard any other sentence that affected me quite the way that sentence did. After so long, and so much worry, finally a SENTENCE! Forget the grammatical problems, it was a sentence. Then the next morning, on Sunday, she said all sorts of things. "They went back there." "There's a ride out there." "I like it. Pretty." Then in the following days, she said things like: "Blue is my favorite color." "I fell down." "Daddy's back!" And that is only about 5% of what she said -- we have a hard time understanding the rest -- but she is talking in sentences and we understand more and more every day. As our nanny says, Piper has a LOT to say. What is amazing to me is that Piper went from saying just one word at a time to talking in full sentences -- and mostly using pronouns and other words appropriately. Rosemary and Henry seem to be right behind Piper, and I really think we'll be hearing sentences from them very, very soon.

Last night Piper really cracked me up. She was trying to squeeze into a tight spot where Rosemary was sitting, and Rosemary didn't want her there. I don't know whether she meant to pull her hair, or whether it just happened, but Rosemary pulled Piper's hair. Piper immediately started saying, "Oh! Oh! She pulled my hair!" Now, one thing that we don't allow is for the kids to hurt each other, and they know that is a big no-no. I asked Piper who pulled her hair, and she looked down at Rosemary. Rosemary was sitting there with a little pout on her face, knowing that she was probably about to get in trouble. Piper looked at Rosemary, and looked at me, and you could tell that she was really thinking. You could almost tell that she didn't want to get Rosemary in trouble (that one time, anyway). Finally, I asked Piper again who pulled her hair. She seemed to finally come up with the right answer in her head, pointed to the front door, and said, "Raccoon!"

The kid's been talking for less than a week and we have our first fib! Too bad I was laughing too hard to explain the whole telling the truth thing to Piper. Maybe next time. . . .