Look who's talking

It's hard to believe that I didn't blog it the second it happened, and even harder to believe that it's been a couple of months since it happened, but Evelyn is talking. OK, she's not really talking in the traditional sense of stringing multiple words together in a meaningful fashion... but she has said a few key words, "Mama" being the first and most important one of all! I think she'd been babbling "mama" indiscriminately and randomly since she was about 7 months old, and started to say it more intentionally to me at around 8-9 months (it's unbelievable how fuzzy my memory is these days!). But nowadays, she definitely knows she's calling me when she says it.

Sometimes it is so sweet and endearing, like when she clamors up my legs, murmuring "Mama Mama" with her arms stretched out for me to pick her up. At other times it is absolutely heartbreaking, like this morning when I had to hand her over to Po Po so I could leave for work, and she was clutching my shirt and crying "Mama Mama" through her tears. During moments like those, it takes all of my will power to pull away and walk out the front door, when all I want to do is take her back in my arms and forget about work.

She's also said "Da da" quite a lot, again starting with the random babbling and occasionally (but not totally consistently yet) saying it with apparent intention to John. The funny thing about saying "Da da" is that she often does it with this high-pitched sing-songy tone, and this from a girl whose voice has always been kind of deep, even as a newborn. I guess she knows how to charm her Papa!

A while back, a favorite game of ours was rolling/throwing a ball back and forth to each other -- she's not so interested in doing that these days now that she's crawling and no longer my captive audience. We've gotten her to say "ball" a couple of times, repeating after us. Even Po Po independently confirmed it, so I know I'm not imagining things! She's said "Mow mow" (Cantonese for "cat") a couple of times, once astonishingly clearly, after we asked her "Where's Mow Mow?" Our jaws literally dropped when she did it (but she hasn't done it since). Another Chinese word is the one for milk - she says it sometimes when she's hungry (I think) for either milk or regular solid food. She even occasionally does the sign for milk that her Po Po's been teaching her if we say the word. (Sadly, her Po Po has been way better than me at teaching her baby sign language, in that she does it at all and I hardly ever remember... bad mommy....)

Other than that, there's still plenty of grunting, screaming, yelling, hollering, whatever you want to call it. And of course, random babbling of other consonants. She's a loud one, that Evelyn, especially when she's excited. You can imagine the sounds she makes when she's on the swing.