Jared's Writing

An explosion of vocabulary is an accurate and appropriate image of how language develops in toddlers. So much of the language which is produced by young toddlers is misused or generalized, but a large amount of language and learning is happening in a short amount of time, these mistakes are encouraged. In this process, my daughter made some amusing developments. I don't mean the, "I want a tweet!" Although adorable, those types of mispronunciations are a product of how sounds are heard and perceived by the child. When Violet was young, maybe around one and a half, she was learning to say more and more words. She hadn't learned to verbalize, "thank you," yet because she knew the sign for it, so relied on that form of communication. As we started seeing more vocabulary development from her, she finally started saying her version of, "thank you." "ma-moo" (Both syllables were cut off, just as if you were to say thank you). We let it...

When Violet was born, it was a stressful time. Morgan was HUGE when she was pregnant with our first child, and one of the people (not Morgan's doctor) that we saw a couple weeks before the due date said that our daughter was going to be too big if we waited until the due date, we should schedule a C-section. Luckily, her doctor had mentioned before that there was just a lot of fluid, and that was part of the reason Morgan was so big. One of my biggest fears the whole pregnancy, was that the umbilical cord would be wrapped around our daughters neck...my fear became a reality, the cord was wrapped around her neck and I didn't know what to do or think. The doctor got it off, and they took her to the table to run the tests and examine her - I was so scared. They had to take her to the NICU almost right away. Morgan didn't even get to hold her. We actually didn't have her name picked out yet, but we had it narrowed down. While we were waiting for our daughter to come back,...