Michelle, and First Words

I gave our daughter the middle name of Michelle. It made sense to me since the Stephanie came from the feminization of my brother's name Stephen, and this was the feminization of a close cousin's name, Michael, and a pretty name besides.

So far as I know, she always hated it. I think it started at six months of age with the first Michelle she ever met, one of my first day-care children. Both girls were at the sitting up stage of development, both first children, and babies love other babies, so I sat them on the floor next to each other to get acquainted. Michelle moved first, reaching out her hand to touch this other baby, and poked her right in the eye! This resulted in our recording Steph's very first word, "Ow!"

I don't think the girls ever actually fought or anything, but they were two different personalities forced to be together five days a week for several years. Pretty much they just weren't interested in each other. There were of course other children in the day care family, including brothers for both girls later, and lots of toys, activities, and room for them to ignore each other.

When Michelle was exactly eighteen months old, her mother, beaming, announced to me as she dropped her off that she knew 18 words! This meant that she was exactly on tract developmentally. Perfectly average, no worries. I congratulated her - I hadn't ever thought to count and keep track - and off to work she went, no doubt thinking the fact that this was news to me was somehow an indication of neglect. In fact, neglect of both our daughters, since I had no idea how many words Stephanie knew at that time, at 16 months, and had admitted as much to Ginny when she asked.

It did get me thinking. So I started counting and writing them down over the next week. Steph talked a lot, showing she knew what words meant by using them appropriately, not just repeating or babbling. In fact, she was starting to string them together in 2-word combinations, something I was very well aware of as a sign of developmental progress. By week's end, there were 116 words! Definitely not average!

I did choose, next time Michelle's mom inquired, not to share that number with her. Michelle needed someone to be proud and encouraging of her perfect averageness, and I wasn't going to throw Steph in her mom's face. (Just gloat in private.)

But Steph's verbal skills did get ahead of us as parents. She learned what "burp" meant, and we taught her "rump" as a polite word when she wanted to name a certain body area. (None of those nasty words for our kid!) But we were startled into silence about what to call it when she farted. We certainly didn't want that word coming out of her young mouth before she learned any discretion - time enough for that conversation later, we thought. It escaped us right then that we could use the term "break wind" if we wanted genteel. But Steph wasn't waiting, and before a week was out, announced proudly to us that she had just burped her rump!