Goodnight Moon

When I got home from Jefferson City today, James came walking into the dining room from the family room looking at me, and he made some gesture against his face that I only caught a glimpse of but looked very deliberate.

A few minutes later, to engage him in something, I asked him if he wanted to read Goodnight Moon, which was sitting on the counter (no visible graphite flecks on book—a relief). As soon as I said "Goodnight Moon," he started saying "mmmooOO" and sometimes even got another "m" at the end of the sounds. And he kept doing it over and over as Julie and I were asking him about Goodnight Moon. He even giggled a little, like he knew he was doing something big.

This is a big step forward—usually you have to very deliberately prompt him for the sound (What does the cow say? It says, MmmmmmoooOOOO, and so on), but this time he repeated the sound back just on his own. And he connected the "moon" and "moo" sounds on his own!

So in the middle of all that, I was prompting him to say "Dad" in sign language, which he did—and that's when I realized that that's what the gesture had been a few minutes earlier when he came walking towards me in the kitchen. Awesome.

We've seen little flashes of active, unprompted speech before—he's had times where he'll sign for "drink" or wave good-bye without being prompted—but they're very few and far between. But James's pattern of learning so far has been to move from those few flash kinds of moments to more sustained demonstrations and then the thing itself—it may take a while, but he can get it. Maybe now that he's walking he's ready to have that kind of take-off with speech—we hope so. If you see him, play repeating games!