Yet another verbal virtuoso

"I did it," Evan announces multiple times a day as he completes simple tasks. "All done," he'll scream loudly as he tosses the remainder of his dinner off his plate. "I am," he'll shout when I ask which of my children is going to be the first to do something. "I Dada," he'll announce happily as Paul walks through the door at the end of the day. "Mama, I deedah," he'll beg as I pull a pizza from the oven.

His pronunciation can still be a little tough to understand sometimes, and he word substitutions still throw everyone but close family and friends. His grammar has quite a ways to go. But at just under 18 months old, Evan is all about the English language. He's starting to string together words into rudimentary sentences. His vocabulary is growing in leaps and bounds. He's got a huge repertoire of songs he tries to sing (with limited success -- "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", for example, still consists of endless "row, row, row, row" crooning and lots of giggles), he's been trying to "read" books aloud and he frequently adds his input to conversations he has not been invited to join. From dawn to dusk, he keeps up a running commentary about Cookie Monster and Daddy and Old MacDonald's Farm, and if I (God forbid) try to tune out the chatter for a few minutes, he talks louder and louder until I'm forced to acknowledge and respond to him. "When did he really start talking," a friend asked me yesterday after watching us converse. "The day he was born," I replied, only half kidding. "You have the most verbal kids," she sighed.

So much for the "boys talk later than girls" theory. So much for the "second kids walk earlier and talk later" thing (complete b.s., that one). And so much for all of my bell curve speculations and worries. The only truth my newest motormouth proves is the most universal truth of motherhood; if you think you know something about your child with any degree of certainty, you are almost certainly about to be proven wrong.