new words

Jael takes after her daddy when it comes to words. So far, they aren't the most clearly enunciated, but she has plenty of them. She has started spending a lot of time playing by herself now and I can hear her wandering around the house chattering to herself some nonsense I can't understand. It makes me laugh.

"Daddy" and "Mama" are really the only clear words she uses, but lately her favorite phrase is "What's that?". At the store, she looks around at everything in wonder and points: "What's that?" (Although it sounds a little more like "wazzat?") She finds some random item around the house and brings it to me, holding it up. "Wazzat?" Or in the morning, she joins us in bed to cuddle before we all get up and loves to roll and flop around, bonking Daddy's head, and then sits up abruptly pointing at the door. "Wazzat?"

While her vocabulary ends there, she has learned to sign "please" and insists on stating some random syllable along with it. We taught her starting with food, but she took it further on her own and uses it to ask for anything she wants. Lately, this would be toothbrushing. I brush her teeth every morning when I brush mine and she sits in her little bumbo on the bathroom counter, holding her toothbrush. I scrub her teeth for a few minutes. Do you have any idea how hard it is to brush a one year old's teeth? She energetically sucks at the tasty toothpaste, moving her head around to avoid feeling the brush against her gums. Finally I just let her have it while I finish getting ready for the day and she happily sits there sucking away until we're finished.