Talking leads to marriage

by silly_sad_machine

My daughter has a vocabulary of more than 50 words.

I’d never have believed it was so high if my wife hadn’t written them all down. Trotting around the house with my 15-month-old, you only get small glimpses of her lexicon. At any given point she only tosses around five or six words. She’ll point out something she sees, like a book or a toy, and call it out to you as if asking a question. “We’ve been calling this one a ‘ball.’ Is that still right?”

But seeing them all written down, all neat and orderly in a list that dropped off the bottom of the page and jumped into a new column … it was staggering. I saw words that I recognized, like “Da-da” (her first) and “Ma-ma,” or “yeah” and “more.” Some she can pronounce clearly, like “toy,” “door” and “up.” Others she has a bit of trouble with. “House” and “outside” sound exactly the same, like an exaggerated “how.” She can’t quite wrap her mouth around “c” sounds yet, and her “pancake” just comes out “pa-pa,” like a machine gun.

A father friend of mine told me once to treasure the first few months of my daughter’s life. “She’ll never be like this again,” he said. And he was right. In those first months she was totally dependent upon me. She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk … she couldn’t even support her own head. She was fragile and defenseless, and she relied on me for everything. And when I held her, she melted on my shoulder as content as she’ll ever be in her entire life.
It’s fairly obvious why evolution favored humans with shorter pregnancies. Our newborns could be like sharks – ready to take on the world before the placenta is even dry – but that’s not very romantic. Sharks must not have an affinity for warm fuzzies.

“She’ll never be like this again.” I can say it every day for the rest of my life, and it will be true every single time. Tomorrow she’ll get better at saying one of her words, and her mind will create a hundred or so brand-new connections. The day after that she’ll learn a new word, figure out how to climb onto our hearth, and see something she’s never seen before. Before I know it, she’ll be in school, she’ll learn about death, she’ll want a driver’s license and she’ll be getting married. And watching her put on her gown, I’ll remember the day I taught her how to say “squeeze,” and I’ll remember how when she said it, it just sounded like a high-pitched squeal. “Eeeeee!”

My daughter is a new baby girl every time she wakes up. I suppose the only way to deal with that is to remember that every time she wakes up, I’m a new dad, too.