Tejana, all wide smiles and dancin’ legs, 
visited today for a couple of hours. She’s a month and a half younger than Sylvan, but she’s always seemed older than her months – very engaged and communicative. Since Sylvan is getting big, scary molars and has been sick, I was concerned about how two toddlers would treat a tired Mom. They handed each other crackers, stole each other’s water, one of them ate sand, and the other had a short tantrum when I told him he couldn’t go down the slide by himself. They were really fun, and, although I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Tejana, she managed to massage that spot even a little more. She grabbed my hand when we walked down the sidewalk, something I can’t convince my little independent to do (which means I end up carrying him like a writhing sack of potatoes across the street). And, tonight, at our Birth to Three meeting, after we’d been apart for two hours, Tejana, the 20-pound linebacker, barreled right onto my lap, sitting with me to sing songs.
A couple of weeks ago, Tejana illustrated an important point about baby development, namely that all babies develop differently. Something I find interesting is the diversity of ways in which similarly-aged babies gain language. Some sign frenetically, making amazing conceptual leaps when they need to figure out how to say words for which they don’t yet know signs. Some pick up many, many verbal words very quickly, most of which don’t really sound like English but all of which mean something specific to the baby; these babies might also frequently mimic the sounds of words they don’t know. Other babies say very little, but if you ask them to “please take the shoe to Daddy,” they’ll do it without a problem.
Sylvan is an immediate mimicker, so he is the master of a large vocabulary that I don’t always understand. Tejana, however, sat on my lap a couple of weeks ago as I read her a story about a cow, which, I told her, said “moo.” That little girl stared at my lips saying “moo” for probably two minutes while she figured out what she had to do to make that sound. Then she got up, said “moo,” and walked away. Tejana makes me smile.