Cwappa and gwass..

Okay, so my first two children spoke well very early on. By the age of two, both girls spoke in complete sentences with generally perfect grammar. That is what I thought was normal.

Along comes girl number three and by the age of two, she is still just putting a couple of words together. Not to mention, the words that she is putting together are only understood by members of our family, sounds like gibberish to anyone else. I start to get a little worried, but soon she is talking, a lot. Unfortunately, it still tends to sound like a secret twin language or something (and she's not a twin). She just turned five and now she is fairly well understood by all. She cannot, however, say her r or l sounds at all. They sound like w.

Well, apparently, she taught number four how to speak because my son has the same ailment. My purpose in sharing this is to explain that it can make for some funny moments around our house as we try to figure out for sure what Taye and Kye are saying. Kye recently got a "clapper" toy, a cheap thing that makes annoying sounds. He says it "cwappa." Sounds like someone from the East coast saying "crapper." Taye was asking me something recently and getting increasingly frustrated because I was misunderstanding her. I thought she was telling me something about "glass" and she was actually telling me about "grass." She pronounces both "gwass."

I've been teaching Taye to read and as part of those lessons, we review the sounds in a word. So, I will say, "Taye, say rrrrrruuuuuunnnnnn." She will say, "Rrrrrr-Wuuuuuuuunnnnnnn." :-)