THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Emma will be 6 in March. Her speech took a very, very long time to get going...
At first, all she could master was a few signs.

Then, slowly, very slowly, Emma started to add new words to her repertoire: we counted them by keeping this record of 20 words, then 24... and so on. After we got to about 100 words we stopped keeping track.

Then her vocabulary really started to expand. She can sing O Canada, Happy birthday, the Barney song.

Her singing really makes me proud. You see, she sings completely off track, just like her sister, like me, and like her grandmother, my mom!!!

The more words Emma says, the more we sometimes have to guess what she is trying to tell us. Like "kiki": we searched and searched to find its meaning. One day my husband said I KNOW WHAT KIKI MEANS!!! It means mittens. Then the next day her EA said I KNOW WHAT KIKI MEANS!!! It means kitchen. To this day we are not completely sure of what kiki means.

Now, we have a problem. We are thinking Thand God Emma can not always pronounce properly. You see, big sister who is almost 14, sometimes swears to affirm herself. We had a discussion about swearing and she said she only does it sometimes depending on her mood.

At suppertime tonight, we're all sitting at the table and Emma keeps saying: Amy, J-C.
We all realized what she was saying and Amy could not believe her little sister picked that up so easily... The common person could not guess what Emma means by J-C, but if someone really paid attention, Emma's secret could be out!!!

I guess Emma's little swearing episode hit home with Amy and we will all be more careful with our language from now on...