Ava talks. And talks and talks and talks. She has a pretty good vocabulary (I don’t have anything to measure it against, but it seems impressive to me for a three-year-old), and her pronunciation is surprisingly sharp (Leah noted with due parental affection last evening how cute it is that Ava pronounces “belly” as “bewwy”).
Heck, Ava should be talking by now, after all. That’s not particularly noteworthy or advanced. I’ve been having a lot of fun recently with the facial expressions she and I make back and forth at each other. This, to me, is more indicative of her intellectual development. We read a fair amount before Ava was born about how important it is to try to maintain a positive emotional and physical demeanor around your child as soon as it’s born. They absorb everything, even when you don’t think they’re paying attention at all; it all sinks in. It’s just that when they’re younger, you often don’t get any sort of indication that what you’re doing is getting through at all.
That’s not the case with Ava these days, which is making this period of her development a really fun time. This morning, I poked my head into her room to see if she was waking up. She was lying on her bed, stretching, looking directly at me. I quickly pulled my head back through the door and then slowly peeked back in to look at her. She was still staring at me. I repeated the game a couple more times until she started to smile (note: first morning smile is like finding a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk). Then I went into her room, leaned over her, and asked, “Can you talk today?” She shook her head. I nodded my head back. She shook her head some more, and I nodded some more. Then she began to beam as she nodded; I shook my head. We continued like this in opposite roles until Ava finally broke into a full smile and rolled over to snuggle her big stuffed dog Pinky.
My father’s father had a great sense of humor, even though he didn’t speak much. I learned to watch him whenever we were in social situations together, because he was always reacting to what was going on with either his face or his body. I didn’t know it then, but he was a master of comedic timing. He taught me (again, silently) that being funny wasn’t so much about what you said, as when you said it. I don’t claim to be any sort of prodigy when it comes to making people laugh (frequent readers of this blog — and my wife — will corroborate that), but I hope I can foster Ava’s sense of humor and impart the importance of laughter. I wonder if there are any children’s books about this kind of thing. Surely there must be. I was thinking there was a comedian out there who’d penned a kid’s book of some kind. Amazon, don’t fail me now….