Friday, March 14, 2014

Learn to speak Charlotte-eze.

About a year ago, Charlotte's spoken language started to develop by leaps and bounds. I remember the exact time frame because it was a couple months after her Celiac disease diagnosis when she started to blow us away by incredible speech and language growth. Slowly over the last year her spoken language increased and her signing decreased. She now no longer uses any signs (with the exception of helping us teach Jack "more" and "all done"), as spoken language has completely taken the place of those signs.

Her speech and language skills are still delayed, and in no way at the same level of her typically developing peers. However, these days, she has no problems expressing her wants and needs with us. At times she is hard to understand, as her articulation needs work, but phrases and sentences are becoming more and more common and it is exciting for us to see her now be able to be understood by individuals outside of our family and friends who are around her on a daily basis. 

She has come up with a few words/phrases of her own though, that only those of us closest to her know the meaning of. They make me smile when she uses them, and I wanted to blog about them in order to document it for us to look back at someday. 

In order to hang with Charlotte, here are a few words/phrases that may need translation:

- "climber" : She wants to sit on your lap. I believe this comes from us telling her to "climb up" when she would bring us a book to read. Note: if she asks you to climber, she must really like you as not everyone receives this privilege. 

-"meal-mellow" : Marshmallows. Our current treats for success on the potty. Remember to give them to her in pairs though, as Charlotte always will ask for "two meal-mellows please." 

- "o-zen" : Frozen. She wants to watch or listen to the "Frozen" soundtrack. Unfortunately "frozen" and "lotion" sound very similar and for awhile she was getting frustrated when I was offering her moisturizer and she wanted to hear "Let it go." 

-"Gotch you": She wants you to pick her up and carry her. She usually asks me to "gotch you" when she gets up from her nap, as she wants me to carry her downstairs because she is still tired. This one I also think comes from me saying "I got you" when I would pick her up. She also says "gotch you" when she wants to hold Jack. 

-"Helper me?": This question usually comes when I am in the kitchen, and she wants to help me. We are working on pronouns, and I always repeat back the correct way it should be said, but I can't help but smile when she asks to "helper me." Her current favorite job is setting the table. 

-"Boo-boo": Her nickname for Jack. Though she also calls him Jack, Jackie, Baby, and Goober; Boo-boo is probably the one we hear most often. 

-"Bab-baid" : Bandaid. A few months back, Jack scratched her and Charlotte received her first bandaid. Now whenever she is hurt (whether it be physically or her feelings hurt), she asks for a bab-baid. Apparently it fixes everything. 

I am sure there are more, but these are some of the ones we hear the most. I tried to get a video to demonstrate some of her language skills, however, as you can see in what I did end up capturing, she is quite the stubborn little 3 year-old. 


Have a great weekend everyone!


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