Budding vocabulary

Nathan's vocabulary is really starting to flourish. For a while there, all I could really understand him saying was "juck" for truck and the usuals like mama, dada and bye-bye. But don't get me wrong, he was saying more, I just couldn't understand it.

You see, before kids came along, I was under the impression that after the usual first words barely being understandable that the next set of pronunciations would be clear as a whistle. I would hear shoe instead of "soo", thank you instead of "deh ooh", sister instead of "dihduh". But one child down and another one coming up in the ranks of language development, and I'm still being reminded daily that this extremely complex skill of speaking will take a while.

I did hear him try to say something that only a mother would hear. (Kudos to you, mom. Keep workin' on it.) On the way to Katherine's school and church there is a road-widening project in the works and we pass by it 3 times/week. From the back seat my little man had a stream of words coming forth from his mouth like, "juck", "sdat mama" and "eh-duh-veh-ta". That last one got me really excited, you see, because those words translated mean: "truck, what's that mama, and excavator." Whoo hoo, mommy gets real excited when she hears her little guy try to pronounce a 4-syllable word and after explaining it to Katherine there was lots of hootin' and hollerin' in praise for the little guy. He could have cared less though, he was still screaming from the back seat "sdat mama".

Lately I decided, for journaling purposes, I'd start writing down the words he is saying that I can barely make out. Although, something tells me that a trained ear might be able to hear more.

The obvious words a stranger could understand:
down
up
off
on
shoes
drink
juice
mama
dada
out
hi
bye-bye
hot
tree
boo
eat
poo-poo

The more difficult ones he's probably been saying for a while, I'm just not picking up on.
dah-din Katherine
doo-dih Good girl
deh-cee Gracie
dih-down Sit down
buh-duh-duh Bulldozer
all-duh All done or All gone
dirh Shirt
diss Kiss
ooh-del-dum Your welcome
duh-dem Button
na-nah Banana
i-puh Diaper
Seat
I see you
deh-he-is There he is
dah-duh Tractor
(can you tell he's mastered the sounds we make with the tip of our tongue, like "d"?)

His animal sounds are coming along also. He can tell us what sounds these animals make:
horse
cow
dog
cat
tiger
bird
duck
fish (smacks his lips)
bunny (tries to scrunch his nose)

Don't ask me why I thought a 12-18-month old would say "cat" and it would sound like "cat" instead of "cah". One semester of Early Childhood Language Development apparently did nothing for me 15 years ago.