This summer, I posted about all the talking that Ellie was doing.  Between then and a couple weeks ago, Ellie basically stopped learning new words.  Not only did she not add any more new words to her vocabulary, but she stopped saying many of the words she had been using and she wasn’t even willing to mimic us to try any new words.  We’d ask her to say a new word and she’d just look at us as if to say, “I’m fine the way I am.  No thanks.”  We stopped even trying to get her to say anything new.

We weren’t worried about this, knowing that language acquisition is a gradual process that every child approaches differently.  Plus, she’s only 25 months old.  We knew that in her own good time, she’d start talking.  I do confess to a lot of curiosity though as to when exactly her desire to talk more would kick in and start the talking train.

In the last couple weeks, the floodgates have opened and the words are flowing out!  She has started copying us in almost everything we say.  This morning, I told her I needed to turn on the printer and she said, “Printer”.  She’s started identifying things by name – things that we haven’t explicitly taught her the words for.  This, in particular, is a miracle for this ESOL teacher.  Language acquisition is so much easier when you’re a baby than when you’re in middle school!

Within the past few days, she has started using almost all of the color words, including, as you’ll see in this video, gold.  GOLD!  I expected her to say yellow when I asked her what color Pooh was and she said gold instead (which is what the book says but still).

“Bath” and “sunset” are new words too that emerged when we made this video!