Kauto's first words

Kauto has been saying his first actual word. It's "hiiri", meaning "mouse". We have a small poster at the wall that's basically an old board game. I found it years ago at a flea market in Pori with some other board games and decided it would make a nice poster. I don't know what the rules are (they were missing when I bought the thing), but it seems to be a dice game in which the cat hunts the mice. The goal is to get to the cheese at the bottom of the board. From the design I should say that it's from the fifties.

Now, Kauto likes to look at posters and all kinds of things on the wall. This one is his favourite. He asks ("huh! huh!") to get to the lap and points the picture and says: "Hii-ri! Hii-ri!" (Actually he says "hii-yi".) He has done this couple of times, the first time being on a Thursday night.

He doesn't really say "äiti/mommy" or something like that, but he uses a word "ätä" which sounds like a real thing. And today he pointed to Elina at the mall and said "ätä". (He was sitting in a toy car and saw Elina through the windshield.)

Kauto is now 12 months. I think Ottilia's first words came when she was eleven months. Or even maybe ten. I'm not sure. Whatever it was, she learned to speak quite early and produced full sentences when she was two years old. Elina was quite surprised to see this when she first got to meet Ottilia. Ottilia's first word was "kala/fish". Her grandma had an aquarium which Ottilia liked to look at. Then she used to say "kato kato kato!" which means "looky looky looky!" when she saw something interesting, such as ladybugs at the window.

It's actually very nice to know that both of my children are quite bright. I'm very proud of them.