Kaia is almost 11 months old, and so I figured at some point soon, she’d start attempting to say real words. I know she knows a lot of what we say just based on her reactions and facial expressions. She knows our tones, like when we don’t want her to touch certain things or go to certain areas of the apartment. When she goes into a room she knows she’s not supposed to enter, she will give a cheeky little smile and look back at us, then make a “run” for it by giggling and crawling as quickly as possible into the room. When I say her name or “Kaia Pookie,” she always looks up at me. When I say “no,” she will hesitate and try to continue what she was doing, even though she can tell I am going to carry her away in another minute. In the last week, though, it really has sounded from her frequent and louder babble that she is truly trying to say real words. I was secretly hoping her first word would be Chinese. So it wasn’t a surprise when today, for the first time, she actually waved at our nanny when she was leaving for the day, and she repeated “buh buh” multiple times while waving her hand up and down. A few hours later, I was changing her diaper and handed her one to hold onto while I was taking off her dirty one, and I said, “I’m changing your diaper now. Can you give me the clean diaper?” And she looked up at me with a huge grin on her face and said, “Dai—paa! Dai-paa!”

I did a double take and looked at her huge smiling face. Did she just say “diaper”??!! She proceeded to repeat it at least 5 or 6 times after that, and I thought, how hilarious: my baby’s first word is “DIAPER”?!