Doctor-induced wagging

You know how Ben wags his finger whenever he hears the lines "The mama called the doctor, the doctor said...." from "Five Little Monkeys"? Well, this morning Neil said to Ben, "We're going to the doctor's office to get a flu shot," and Ben started wagging his finger! So he hears and understands the word "doctor" even when it's in a completely different context.

In other news, Ben is really making progress with expressive language. There are days when he's a bit on the quiet side, or he reverts to old patterns of vocalization (primarily vowels, or the same few repeated consonant sounds). But on most days he's pretty talkative. His most impressive word so far is apple, which comes out like "aaaapp". He also says Mama, Dadda, bye-bye, kitty ("gedda"), can ("guh"), Bob (as in Bob the Builder -- he has become a devout Bob fan), more ("mo-mo"), and bubble ("ba-ba"), and he makes brave attempts at a variety of other words. He can also tell you what sound a horse, sheep, or lion makes. Yesterday he was saying "knee" and pointing to his knee. When we ask him to make various consonant sounds (e.g. "ma-ma", beginning with m, b, g, w, n, or d), he is pretty good at imitating us. He still prefers repeated syllables rather than mixing up different consonants, so the speech therapist is currently working on what is called "variegated" babbling. Also, he seems to be a little behind in what the experts call "jargon", which is babbling with adult-like inflection ("Ba ba GA ga wa goo?"). However, I think that in most respects his expressive language is either right on target or even a little ahead. And his little voice is so sweet and lyrical!