Animal sounds

Our little budding vocalist has just started to be able to mimic animal sounds. Here, I mean the term "mimic" very loosely becos her little tongue's still trying to get around all the difficult words and vowels, even simple animal sounds :)

A friend had given Faith a book titled "The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle. The story featured different types of farm animals and the sounds that they make. I had been reading them to Faith as part of her bedtime ritual. And was quite taken by surprised myself one day when I casually asked her as usual what sound a tiger makes and she said "rrrr...".

Encouraged, I tried asking her to tell me the sounds of other animals that were commonly featured in some of her books and was rather tickled when she tried in her still somewhat babyish babble to make coherent sounds.

Just so you'll know and be amused, these are the animal sounds that Faith's capable of mimicking at this point in time.

Me: What sound does a tiger makes, Faith?
Faith: rrrr.... (a very meek tiger if there’s one)

Me: What sound does a cow makes?
Faith: mmmm... (like the appreciative sound one makes of a good meal)

Me: What sound does a dog makes?
Faith: hoo-hoo-hoo (makes huffing noises)

Me: What sound does a cat makes?
Faith: mmmm... (same sound as that for a cow)

Perhaps she'll get better at it soon, or perhaps not. Either ways, it doesn't really matter very much to Louis nor myself whether Faith speaks clearly or not. The key thing is that she's learning how to speak, at her own pace, in her own time.

Meantime, we get most of what she wants to communicate with us, either through words, baby signs, grunts or her pulling us to show us what she wants.

There will come a day, sooner than we would have like, when she would be speaking so clearly that we wish we could pretend we don't understand what she's saying.

For now, we're getting a lot of amusement, laughter and parental pride at her mini achievements at learning to speak.