Jaia is turning into a real chatterbox. She talks all the time, but only by her perogative. Never, ever on command. If she learns a new word, we’ll try to get her to say it in front of someone and she clams up. She is quite literally the opposite of a performer.
She’ll hold the phone up to her ear and chat with the imaginary person on the other end, but if we are actually talking to someone and put the phone to her ear, she pulls it away and just stares at it. And that’s nothing compared to when the video camera comes out. We have barely any footage of her from the last few months because she’ll notice it and run in the opposite direction. She just wants nothing to do with being the star of the show.
So now, as we’ve been trying to teach Jaia how to say please when she wants something rather than just reaching her arms up and grunting for it, we thought we were taking on quite the challenge. How to convince her to say something – on command – each time she wants something?
The first few times she ignored us. Literally pretended she didn’t hear us and looked the other way. A couple of times she threw a little tantrum or just grunted louder until she got what she wanted. There were even the times where she decided that it just wasn’t worth the effort and gave up asking for X.
And then, just the other day, she said ‘peeeze’ when Dan asked her to, before he handed her her doll. We both got so excited and she began clapping at herself. So we tried again. Again she said peeeeze, this time a ittle louder. It’s like a light went off and she realized that we were immediately handing her what she was asking for if she preceded it with an adorable, squeaky little ‘peeeze’.
And now, every day since then, she’s taken no convincing. She uses peeeze whenever we ask her to. She’s even used it a few times without prompting. She’s definitely catching on. But don’t expect her to say it in front of you if you visit. My bet is that she’ll want to master this one on her own before letting it slip out in front of an audience.
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