Category Archives: The Kids

Okay, maybe “berry” wasn’t his very first word.

Okay, I think I’ll be qualifying Enzo’s utterace of berry as his first noun, as opposed to his first word, and maybe even only first one that I’ve heard… or noticed.

Being the wiggler that he is, Enzo requires a certain amount of holding and wants to see whatever it is I’m doing at the moment, especially when I’m cooking. He loves this. And I get the sense that he does this at his mom’s house too, because last week he started reaching out toward the stove and whispering: hot. And then pulling back, as if he’s been instructed to stay away from the stove because it’s hot.

So, at the very least Enzo has been saying hot for some time prior to the berry episode.

Enzo’s First Word

I think we may have a winner. If you don’t count the word “Hi,” which he uses to greet everyone and everything all the time, I believe Enzo’s first recognizable noun, used correctly and in context, is berry.

I’ve been giving Enzo sliced strawberries in the morning lately, and he enthusiastically devours every bite. He notices now when I take the container out of the fridge, and gets very excited about this. At the same time, some of his most-used phonemes lately have been in the “bree? bui? ba? maiee?” range (as Jacki so precisely noted), which gets him close. But this morning, it all came together: after I placed his strawberry breakfast on his high-chair tray, he picked up a slice and held it up to me, and announced: Beyee?

Actually, Uncle Drew was the first to make this call, last night at dinner. At the time, I sort of passed it off as a coincidental syllable (there were strawberries on the table, and Enzo was very chatty at the time). I should know better, seeing as how E and Drew have their special thing. But this morning’s sample had a nice, lab-conditional clarity about it.

Berry!