Wah Wah Wah

Nora's vocalizations have become much more complex recently. She's been playing a lot lately with the O and A vowel sounds, and getting a lot of positive reinforcement for those sounds because most of her vocalizations sound somewhere between "hola" and "oh yeah!" Just the other day she said "hola" with perfect pronunciation and inflection. Unfortunately she was alone in the room at the time. And yesterday she said her name. After bath time, she was standing, with my help, naked on the changing table looking at herself in the mirror, pounding on her chest like a proud gorilla, and suddenly she shouted, "I'm Nora!" I'm reasonably positive that she doesn't yet understand the meaning to that sonic utterance, but both her mother's and my brains recognized the pattern of sound as being English words. Soon after that, when her mother was trying to cut her toe nails, I said, "Who's the bravest monkey?", to which she shouted, "Nora!" She's also getting to the stage where she can somewhat understand mimicry, either repeating the actions of another, or being amused when another person repeats her actions. A favorite game is for her to raise her hand above her head, causing me to do the same, she drops it, I drop mine...and repeat. Controlling Daddy's arms like he's a puppet is a lot of fun.

The other day when I was trying to entertain her during bath time, I decided to make the "wah wah" sound with my hand over my open mouth. She immediately repeated my action, though using the back of her hand instead of the palm. We continued doing this back and forth for a while. The next day I decided to record a video of her doing this, because it was just so cute.