a [really exciting] Lily update

After my recent post on Lily's speech delay (and others that you can read here and here), we're finally at a point of encouragement. The exact week I posted about Lily's current speech delay, she started saying words out of nowhere! Maybe some of you read my post and prayed for her? That's my feeling, because words have been coming ever since my most recent post, and improvements in most areas of her speech!

Since my last post, Lily has at least 5 new words, but maybe up to ten. It's hard to keep track and we're still figuring out what qualifies as a word, but I'm inclined to say she has ten more :) My favourite new word in her vocabulary? Oli. Melt.My.Mama.Heart.

Oli is actually a hard word for many kids, and he often gets "o-wee" from kids Lily's age, but she actually says "oLi" (or Oli-Oli-Oli), so we're especially proud of her pronunciation on that one. She's been much quicker at imitating us too. Words that she hasn't yet made her own (as in, she doesn't yet say them on her own without prompting) are still a great encouragement because where she used to just babble back at us when we asked her to say something, she now repeats much of what we say! Just last night I was prepping her for a babysitter to watch her and talking nonstop about Katie. I asked her, "Lily, can you sat Kat-ie?" And she said it the rest of the night! Katie is her first name other than in our immediate family and one of her first words that combines two syllables that aren't repeats (such as mama). Another one she's rocking since yesterday: Turtle. Random, but so awesome.

Seeing her pick up several words in a short span of time has been so encouraging. She'd added words to her vocabulary before, but it was sometimes months between new words, now its hours, it seems! If you've been praying for Lily and her speech, thank you. We have such a sense of God's hand in this sudden explosion of progress. And we're so proud of our girl - who in this time span has also become potty trained! If you can't tell, we're just beaming over here :)