Just wanted to send a message of solidarity to my fellow parents. Mine are 3 and 8 months, it's been a week and a half in lockdown so far and it is TOUGH. Don't know how we'll get through the weeks and months ahead. I guess it's about taking one day at a time and being thankful that we all have our health. And getting some booze in for after bedtime.
I'd drink more but I'm playing Doom Eternal after bedtime, and that game needs me to be sober lol. Probably a bad combination.
His eating habits have gone down a bit more now that milk is on offer more days of the week.
I'm still slightly worried about his lack of talking. I keep trying my hardest to get him to say things but he just doesn't. He says "hi" all the fucking time now. For a bit he was saying "Go car go" but now it's morphed into him just saying it all the time without real context so not sure what's going on there. He still doesn't say mama or dada outside of one singular time for my wife. He did learn "no" a week or so ago so that's fun.
He also knows a lot of animal noises and seems to pick them up quickly. He can do elephants, hippos, cows, chickens, goats, sheep, horses, pandas, monkeys, and gorillas all to varying degrees. "Moo" is mostly just "mmmm" which is kinda amusing that right now he thinks we all make cow noises when a food is tasty. He absolutely loves his little people animal playsets.
My kid's eating habits have gotten worse too. Can't tell if it's teething, or because he's getting sick of my food, or if he's just starting to get stir crazy like the rest of us. Maybe all of the above. I dread meal times more than ever now, because basically every meal this weekend has involved a tantrum to some degree.
As for talking, here's some stuff that the speech therapists I was seeing before the quarantine taught me. I don't know if you know this already, but I figured it might help to list it out just in case it helps. Plus a few people here have mentioned worries about speech development, so maybe it'll help in general.
The speech therapists I've seen teach parents to teach their kids by modeling new words for the kid to copy, in the hopes that the kid eventually picks up the word by association. So for example:
If you want to teach the kid "in", you could make a game where you put objects into a container. The speech therapist in this case had a small plastic container filled with water, and small fish toys you drop into it. So then you show the kid that you can put a fish into the container by putting a fish in and saying "fish IN" (with emphasis on IN) as you do it. Then give another fish to the kid so that he can copy what you just did, and you can narrate "fish IN" as he does it. Show him this a few times until he understands the game.
Once that's established, the next thing to do is to cover the opening on the container with your hands and try to get the kid to say "in" before you take your hands away and let the kid put the fish in. To do this, cover the opening when the kid has the fish, look at the kid, and say "fish...." and wait for the kid to say "in". If the kid says "in", take away your hands and praise the kid. If he doesn't do it within 30 seconds or so, take your hands away and say "in" as the kid puts the fish in anyway, because you don't want him to get too frustrated. Repeat, and the kid should eventually pick up that you're waiting for him to say something before you take your hands away. If the kid loses interest and moves on to something else, try to find some other game instead of pressing the issue. The point is to gently encourage him to learn to use words to communicate without creating situations where he feels pressured to do something.
A low success rate is probably okay as long as there's progress. Sometimes my kid would only say the expected word once or twice before losing interest and moving to another game.
Other situations I've been shown:
"Car DOWN" (car going down a slide or something)
"give ____" (basically asking for you to give any object)
That's for functional words that try to describe something or ask for you to do something. For labeling objects, I think I was told to point or show something, and say the name of it to model the word for my kid. The recommendation here was to simplify your own speech as much as possible so that the kid only has one word to pick up from you, and doesn't need to pick out the word himself from a longer sentence. So you'd hold a car and say "car", instead of "this is a car".
