When words lie

About a week or two before Jaden started saying “Dada” he had walked around saying “baba…baba….baba” almost constantly. Well, it wasn’t constant, but it was so frequent that I could not for the life of me decipher what “baba” meant.

At first I thought he was referring to his bottle. I’d ask if he wanted milk. He’d flash me the ASL (American Sign Language) sign for “all done,” which is Jaden’s way of saying NO, usually vehemently. I thought, ‘maybe he doesn’t understand that I am offering him a bottle’? So I’d pull the bottle out of the refrigerator and show it to him – again I’d get the sign for “no” – this time with a furious look on his face as if wondering “what is wrong with you- didn’t I just tell you NO?!”

We had an idea that we might know what he was saying with ‘baba’ but we didn’t have it confirmed until tonight. Rick figured it out for sure. It seems that all this time Jaden was saying Mama. Yes, baba==Mama in Jaden speak. Evidently we must talk with a very nasal tone (haha – no one from LI is nasal, right?), or maybe the ‘b’ sound is just a common first attempt at the ‘m’ sound.

The thing that threw us off for so long is that there was one afternoon we had popped in the “Baby Signing Time” DVD #2 and they sign “mom”. Every time the woman on the DVD said “mom” Jaden repeated it. I guess it was just pure mimicking rather than actually knowing he was saying mom since he hasn’t done it since then, and when Neville points to me and says “who is that?” he says “Baba baba baba….” So there you have it. Baba and Dada are SO proud of their angel. First words are beautiful.