The Great Communicator

Quinn is learning to communicate quite clearly. Developmental books we read talk about toddlers getting frustrated when their ability to communicate can't keep up with their understanding and desire to do so. With a combination of Quinn's inventive ways and some solid parsing by Bec, this doesn't seem to be the case for Quinn.

Example: Monday night we were all returning from a dinner out and Quinn was walking (actually running top speed for a lot of it). To keep him moving along, we focused on the fire hydrants along the way, and specifically the ones up ahead. He steamed around the corner of one building, and then looked around quizzically, and said "ennn see" and shook his head. "Ennn" has long been his word for "again" or "another"; 'see' was quite clearly spoken and is a word he recently learned so it seemed a reasonably surefire assumption; the head shaking was plain as day. After Bec and I looked blankly at one another for a second, feverishly trying to crack this word puzzle, Bec blurted out "'again', 'see', 'no'...we were looking for fire hydrants and he can't find the next one". We pointed out the hydrant, which was behind a telephone pole, and he checked it out briefly before we sprinted to the next one.

You still need a large helping of Quinn-to-English dictionary, but he can definitely get his point across. This is a real-life word game that's so much fun to play.