Maya The Talker

Maya cruised past her 19th month birthday last week. She is 34.5 inches tall and weighs 27.25 lbs, numbers that put her in the 97-98th percentile for height and 75-80th percentile for weight. The smile that lit up her face when she was a month old continues to be one of her prominent characteristics. She's still an exuberant child, delighting herself with the wonders that surround her and delighting us with her ebullience.

She was quite a talker, even as a two month old baby. Now, she is a riot. She speaks complete sentences, with intonations and pauses, question marks, commas and full stops. All in a language all her own. She has a vocabulary of about 10-13 words that we can understand. Words such as mama, papa, nana (for the nanny and banana), ajji, akka, ka ka (for crow), ana (for ane, elephant), ami (for turtle), anna (rice), bow-wow (for dog), car, amma, mum-mum (for food) and kaka (for poop). As a true Californian, the very first legible word she spoke which she used precisely and every time was agua (Spanish for water). It was not Kannada (our mother tongue) or English, but a Spanish word that she spoke first and no, it was not mama or papa.

But she doesn't let her limited vocabulary of the adult world limit her from expressing herself with words from her baby world. As someone who enjoys her silence, Shanthala is partly terrified that as Maya gets older, Maya and I will be talking so much that she will have to seek asylum from the constant chatter that will be a hallmark of this household.

A small taste of what our daily world is like with Maya is shown in this video where Maya proceeds to talk on the phone, sing a ditty, applauds her own efforts and say a few of the words that we understand such as ajji, nana and akka.