Say It Proud!

You may need to turn the volume way up to hear this one... but it's really really REALLY exciting for us. Just in the past couple of weeks, Noa has started to say things that approximate words (see our recent post with her saying "lunch") but now she's had a real explosion of - not just sounds - but also the desire to imitate sounds. This is really huge for a number of ways:

1. Noa has always loved it when we imitated her, but she has only rarely imitated us - and only when we make a sound that sounds like it might feel fun to make (spitting, vibrating sounds). But now she is trying nearly every sound we ask her to try - with varying success. For example in this clip she tries "drink" which she really hasn't gotten the hang of yet, but she makes a few attempts trying to find the right way to make some of the sounds.

2. Noa has never been able to really combine two sounds. In the past we've had "e-e-e-e" and "b-b-b-b" and even "shhhhhhh" but nothing with two distinct sounds like lunch which come out as "L-ch" or yes which comes out "ja-shh." Apparently she got "ha ha ha" from a book at school that has a vampire who says ha ha ha.

3. She seems to really understand some of these sounds and trying to use them as words, for example: yes and no (she says "na na na") and lunch (which she always does with the sign for food, so she clearly associates the two).

4. This one is soooo hard to quantify but there is a big difference between the sounds she made previously and these sounds because she is playing with the sounds, rather than the sensation. Her old "D" sound which sounded like d-d-d-d-d seemed to be about the feeling of her tongue on the roof of her mouth. But tonight we were working on drink (which she really doesn't have hear) and she was really trying to figure out how to make the sound "da" with her full voice.

The change has been so dramatic that her teachers at school and her music therapist have all be contacting us just amazed at this new, exciting development. It really has been, for us, quite a spectacular couple of weeks!