While I’m sure that your kids are probably fine speech-wise, perhaps it’s time to ask about getting them evaluated by Early Intervention? At least in MA, it’s free. They could either 1) Tell you your kids are perfectly normal and why did you bother them (yay!) or 2) Tell you that they could use some services to help them catch up (also yay, because early services help reduce any gaps). I freely admit that I’m biased about the importance of EI. I did get my kids evaluated at 12 months for speech (Danny) and speech & gross motor (Abigail). Although I thought that they were about equal speech-wise (no words), Danny qualified for services (with a 5 month delay) and Abigail didn’t (with a two month delay). They were looking at a lot of very subtle signs that I never would have known to look for. Now, he has someone come in each week to work with him (and Abigail, because she refuses to be left out of anything) around speech and I feel better having gotten him services (even though I wish he was perfect speech-wise and had 10 words).

That said, I know nothing about speech issues and your kids are probably fine, but it is certainly an option if you’re worried. And the evaluation is really interesting to watch. Ok, so I’m a clinical social worker and that might be why I was fascinated, but it was really interesting to watch them test cognitive abilities in a 12 month old (they scored at 15 months on that—-go kiddos!).

Up until 2 weeks ago, the boys would say these words with regularity (besides ‘mama’ and ‘dada’):

apple
banana
dog
bye-bye

They said these words, but only a few times:

hi
baby
ball
blue
bubble

It seems like the jibber-jabber going back and forth between the kids is totally understandable…but only to THEM, they have no need to add to their speech repetoire.

I was initially concerned with their ‘lack’ of real words. I have two friends with kids about our boys’ ages and they are both WAY more verbal (we’re talking full-on sentences here). I first thought it was because my kids are in group childcare and they don’t get a lot of one-on-one attention during the day. But after doing some reading in a few different books, I found that boys tend to develop their speech later on than girls (both of my friends’ kids’ are girls) and twins tend to develop much later than singletons (both of my friends’ kids’ are singletons) because they communicate with eachother.

But then the ‘explosion’ or their word repetoire happened…seriously overnight. Now they seem to add a new word every day. But like I said, this wasn’t until two weeks ago that this happened.

They transferred into the toddler room about a month ago and I truly believe that having older kids around (they are the youngest right now) has helped them. Not saying that you should rush out and enroll them in Montessori, but I do think the older-kid factor plays a big part in the learning curve of several different things.

Like Dana said, I’ve been reading both of your blogs for almost
exactly two years now. It’s been fun to see the differences in both our pregnancies and our kids, even though we were all pregnant at the same time and delivered within the same week in January. However, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t read each of your blogs and wonder “when are F & R going to do this/that?”…the first time was when they were barely two months old and F & O and A & O started to smile, but it was yet another two weeks before F & R showed us their gummy smile. Giggling, standing, crawling, eating, etc…all things that I’ve asked our ped about because “some other twins I read about are doing XYZ…”.

My little boy speaks 9 words really well – mum, dad, thank (thank you and he uses it appropriately), map, Dora, hi, bye, jump and yum yum. He also knows 4 letters of the alphabet and can point them out in a book.

Now, mind you my twins are 21 months old. I’m not concerned because I know he’s smart in his own way and I know he can do a lot of things that his sister can’t. I also know that I shouldn’t compare them to each other or to anybody else’s children but of course it’s hard not to and of course secretly in the back of your mind you do it. I know that eventually my little man will catch up and if not then when he turns 2 we’ll speak to the pediatrician about it.

Once kids hit 50 words, they tend to start using two word combos. We saw a huge difference when that happened in our house. By 2, Nate had a couple hundred words in his vocabulary and would talk in complete sentence. Alex had a little more than 30 words.

Plus this month is all about travel–I’d love to share more tips from parents of multiples. Please leave a comment or two with your nuggets of travel wisdom.