First Word?

It is a very real possibility that Clara Grace vocalized her first word on Monday, April the twenty-fifth. While playing in the yard with her mommy on a cheerful spring day, Clara Grace watched Katie, the Australian Shepherd; persistently drop her slobbery ball on mommy’s foot to be kicked. Distinctly, and with evident effort, Clara Grace announced, “Dog.” Her mommy interrupted her phone conversation in order to report to Liana, “What do you know? My baby girl just said ‘dog!’ Of course,” Clara Grace’s mommy acknowledged after the long moment of disbelieving silence on the other end of the line, “Of course, she probably didn’t really mean anything by it.” Tuesday proved to be rainy and cold, so Clara Grace and her mommy stayed indoors. And that might have been the end of it, except that while playing in the back yard on the afternoon of Wednesday the twenty-seventh, Clara Grace very clearly declared “Dog,” once more. This time, her mommy reacted with a bit more enthusiasm “Yes!” she exclaimed, “Yes, this is a dog!” As she spoke, she bent down to scratch the top of the drooling Australian Shepard’s head. Clara Grace’s mommy is well aware that most everyone will read this report with a skeptical eye. After all, at this point, the consonants D and G do admittedly make up the vast majority of her daughter’s vocal repertoire. However, the facts remain that Clara Grace made a distinct effort to pronounce each part of D-O-G. She has repeated the word twice so far, and she has not vocalized it as part of her many babblings while indoors. And so there it was, with that one little vocalization, all the hopes Clara Grace’s mommy had cherished of hearing that magical word, “Mama,” roll with first importance from her daughter’s tongue were painfully stripped away. And as much as Clara Grace’s mommy and daddy hate to admit it, after a few more days of examination it may be declared that Katie, the insanely irritating Ausie, has claimed the honor of being Clara Grace’s very first word.