I’m a little bit glowing today. My little girl is growing up so fast. She just turned 11 months, and now we have her first word.
Earlier in the week we heard that she might be speaking from her teachers. It was nice to hear, but we weren’t really sure. Of course we trust the teachers, and expected to hear it ourselves soon, but you never know.
Then, this morning, we heard it. We’ve all gotten ready. My wife is about to head out and take the kids to daycare. (I’m on pickup duty if anyone was wondering.) Airi, our girl, waves goodbye as she likes to do. And the. We hear it.
“Bye bye.”
We waved. She repeated. We kept waving, getting more and more excited. She kept talking. Our son got involved in the fun (probably wanting a bit of attention his way, but can you blame him?) We all agreed. She spoke her first word.
I’ll admit, I was a little surprised to look it up and see that 11 months is a pretty average age for kids to start speaking. Ours is a bilingual home with both English and Japanese being spoken and everything I’ve read suggest that most bilingual kids start speaking later.
Maybe I should be surprised. Leo started speaking at around this age as well, and has been chatty ever since. Maybe Airi will be the same way.
Another surprising thing is that both kids had the same first word. Yep, both our munchkins started off saying “bye bye.” My theory is that this is the word a has a lot of use in both of our spoken languages, so it is imaginable that they both heard this word more than any other. Either way, I’m so proud of how much she has grown, and hope she keeps growing safely and happily.
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