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”).<\/p>\n
Heck, Ava should <\/em>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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ava","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9oLlO-fi","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}