"Ma ma ma mama ma ma ma"

Calling all Moms! Calling all Moms! I need you to weigh in on something for me…you see, Brent and I cannot agree on something and I want to know where other Moms stand on the issue. Don’t worry, it’s not an argument or anything remotely life-threatening…I promise!


You see, Jax does a lot of baby babble right now. He’s learning how to use all of those facial/tongue muscles right now, and he definitely already has control of the volume on his vocal chords! He sits around blowing bubbles, making repetitive sounds and chewing on everything in sight all day long. And more often than not he’s “baby babbling” while he does all of this. If you’ve got kids you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t have kids, just string together a bunch of noises and consonant sounds together and you’ve got baby babble…just meaningless noise, I say.

But it’s cute. Really cute. Because when they sit there babbling away, they get animated and excited and they smile SO big when you babble back to them…it’s just the cutest phase.  Most of what is said is just babbling nonsense. But occasionally, babies manage to string together a sound or two that actually makes a word. Here’s where the disagreement comes in…Jax’s latest noise is “Ma ma ma mama ma ma ma” and so on and so forth.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Brent gets ALL kinds of excited when he hears that specific babble because HE thinks that Jax is actually saying “mama.” He thinks this because once out of forty-five million repeats of the “ma” sound, two of them get jammed together to form that precious word “mama.” 

Sandy thinks that it’s just baby babble. Sure, he’s mastered the “ma” sound and can even manage to string them together fast enough for a “mama” sound every once in a blue moon. But it’s just meaningless baby babble.

Brent thinks that Jax has said his first word – “Mama”.

Sandy doesn’t count this as a word since he’s not calling something/someone that word, just randomly making the sounds.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I would love, love, LOVE for his first word to be “Mama” - there’s no Mom on the planet that could honestly say otherwise. And I’ll even admit to a little leap of my heart when he manages to string together the “mas” to form a “mama” every once in a while. It happens, and it does make me smile.

But he’s not looking at me, calling ME “Mama”. He’s just sitting there playing with the tag on his exersaucer and saying “ma ma ma mama ma ma” over and over to infinity.

I think that words only count if he means to say them, calling a particular item (doesn’t have to be the right item) by that word. Brent thinks that Jax is advanced in his language skills and has started to talk months before all of the baby books tell you to expect it. And when I question this, do you want to know what response I get? Something along the lines of other things that he’s done in advance of when he was “supposed” to do them…rolling over, cutting teeth, etc etc.

We’re at a stalemate here…not an official type of ugly fighting stalemate, but a stalemate none-the-less. So I want to know what you think, dear readers.

When do baby words count? Whenever they first say them, regardless if they even understand that they’re saying them. Or when they mean to say them and attach that word to a specific item/person. Those are your choices…let me know what you think!