V is for Victory

I think it's official...We're declaring "mama" Kayla's first word. I was initially hesitatnt, not wanting to jump the gun. She's been babbling the "ba"s and the "ga"s and the "da"s for some time now, but she indiscriminately applies them to everything from her bottle to the TV to a passing stranger to her bed. The "ma" however, well, it's focused. That's not to say that she won't occasionally just babble it too, but she definitely uses it to name me. She calls to me from her crib and on Monday, when I was getting ready to leave for DC, as I started to walk out the door, she reached up, pouted, looked me right in the eye and said (in a very heart breaking little voice), "Mama!" She now crawls over to me, tugs on my pants and with a focused expression calls, "Mama". She also tends to repeat it when she wants to be rescued from her crib in the morning, when I disappear around a corner and she's looking for me, when something scares or upsets her and when she is crawling toward me from across the room. Now, as I said, she also occasionally does the "mamamama" when she is clearly not even remotely thinking about me, but as my mom pointed out, babies only have so many sounds they can make, so it doesn't discount her using it in reference to me, just because she also occasionally babbles it at something else too. My mom is the best. At any rate, first word or not, I love that she finally has the "mamamama" down. It is so fun to hear her calling it in the morning as she sits up and stretches in bed. Slightly less fun to hear her whine it when she has woken up at 3am or when she's mad because she doesn't want to have her bib put on or her diaper changed, but hey...never look a gift horse in the mouth, right? (Side note: Weirdest Idiom...)