Look who's talking now!

Verbal communication is finally starting to make sense to my 20-month-old son! He's been saying words for several months but many of them he doesn't utter on a regular basis. He'll just say a word all of a sudden, very clearly, and you're surprised to hear him say it.

Of course his favorite words he's been saying all along ... eat, Momma and Daddy being probably the top three. He signs for a lot of things, milk being his favorite, first, and most used sign. He first signed for milk at five months. He also signs for eat and will sign for a lot of other things as well.

For the past month or so he's learned to babble so he'll talk that way, gesturing and all.

This past week he's actually been talking and saying words regularly. He'll get the ending sound right, use any vowel, and usually leave off the beginning sound. He has never used a word for milk before, but the past few days he's been saying "ilk," "ohk" and all manner of vowel combinations with the "k" sound at the end.

His verbal communication has always been fun for us as his older sisters were very articulate and profuse with their verbiage at a very early age. At 20 months they were both speaking in perfectly understandable paragraphs. But everyone is completely different. We are all having fun as he starts to speak and are as proud of him as if he were the first child to utter speech.