Chatty Cathy

So first of all, after I wrote the title, I realized I feel sorry for anyone named Cathy because I am sure at some point in their life they were referenced as a "Chatty" or a "Not so Chatty" Cathy. Anyway....that was way out of left field!

So I had an old copy of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory from grad school (I've since used it a couple times at work) so I brought it home and Jason, Harper, and I filled it out tonight. Among other things it includes a vocabulary checklist (divided into categories such as Descriptive Words, Pronouns, Prepositions, Question Words, etc.). We used this to calculate Harper's total number of words said spontaneously as of today, 4/3/2012. She gets a new one almost every day so if we did this in another week it would probably be different. She currently has 186 words!!! That is so wild to me. But this mommyspeech-languagepathologist is very happy with that. I included Harper in the "help to fill it out" because we talked about it at dinner and she would pipe in every now in then with a word that we would be talking about "Does she understand what ___ means?" or "Does she say this spontaneously?". I am saving this in her baby book and will fill it out again maybe around her second birthday. I am just including it in the blog mostly for our families who I will probably forget to tell!


PS- If you are ever concerned about your child's language or speech please don't hesitate to ask your pediatrician for a referral for an evaluation. If they try to 'yeah yeah' you but you are still concerned press the issue. It never hurts to check it out and in most cases your insurance will pay for all or most of the cost of the evaluation.