Dopers are smart people, and we like to talk about ourselves - who doesn’t? Not all of us can participate in polls about one’s offspring, but we can talk about our own feats. So let’s revisit dopers’ babyhoods for another poll.
How old were you when you began to walk?
Began to talk? (do you know your first word?)
Any idea how you compare to your siblings?
walk - Family lore has it that my parents were not anxious to me being mobile on two feet, so they purposely didn’t try to help me learn to walk. My aunt Doris (dad’s younger sister) decided during the party they held for my birthday that one-year-olds ought to be walking, so she repeatedly set me on my feet all day. To my parents’ dismay, that was all it took before I was ready to totter about on my own two feet.
talk - My first word, at seven months was “fuck.” Yep, no mistaking that one for babbling repeative sounds. According to my dad I was speaking a few dozen words by the time I turned one. Then, once I was on my feet, didn’t say anything for weeks. Once I got the walking thing down I progressed to sentences at about 18-months-old and could, to quote my dad “hold an intelligible conversation with an adult” before age two. Thus, it came as no surprise to him at my grade-K parent-teacher confrence that my teacher told them I had the largest vocabulary of any five-year-old she’d ever met.
sibling - my parents decided that they’d try the not helping a baby to walk thing again, but that only earned them two months extra peace…and he progressed to running almost immediately! And Vynce spoke just as young, and just as well. (I have trouble remembering him not talking, truthfully.) No wonder he decided to major in English too
Once I learn how to use my new scanner, we need a Dopers’ baby pictures thread in MPSIMS
Walk: 8-9 months. I was doing the “standing up and holding onto something” thing, and saw a cat, got excited, and toddled after the cat, forgetting to hold on.
Talk: first word (“hot” - we had a woodstove) 8 months, 30 words(ish) by 9 months
Siblings: Both were a little later for walking and talking, I think maybe around 10 months for both. We were all pretty early, though.
I don’t know when I started to walk, but I didn’t talk voluntarily until I was almost four.
My parents had to force me to talk in certain situations (the dinner table, for example, I didn’t get food until I used at least one word). Grunting wasn’t acceptable but “potatoes” was. They worked on please and thank you later.
My first words were “HE SCORES” watching hockey with my dad. I was maybe one. After that I only communicated in grunts.
I remember practicing by myself in my room and not being satisfied with my words. My mom tells me I walked up to her one day and said “what’s for lunch?”. They were concerned about me starting school if I wouldn’t talk.
Even though I knew both the Julian and Gregorian calendars as well as the solar and lunar cycles by heart by the time I was 6 months old, my parents refused to give me paper and pen of sufficient quality so that I could record milestones in perpetuity. All I have are Polaroid moments which can only be aged that precisely by correlating the clothing worn by the adult props in the photos with the original air date of 70’s TV shows. Until forensic technology advances, I will just have to conclude that I talked before a year and walked somewhere around that time. I know for certain that I was a proficient swimmer by age 3 and even have proof in the form of a big cake with a THREE on it and me and my friends in a pool.
I was walking and talking at 8 months. According to my dad, I just up and started running around one day to everyone’s surprise.
My first word was “No” in response to my mom’s request to return an ice cream cone. After which I apparently began talking non-stop about everything. I still talk a lot.
I’d have to double check with my Mom, but the following is as I understand it.
I had to have a hernia sugery when I was one (younger than two at any rate), and I was left in the hospital overnight. Apparently, there was another kid named dnooman in the same room as me (wierd huh?). So, every time they had to wake him, which was fairly frequently for some reason, I woke up too. Turns out it was because they said something along the lines of “wake up dnooman” every time they needed to wake up the other kid.
I would wake up (as instructed), and then watch them inject the other kid with something. Apparently, after a few instances of this, I was awakened (along with the other dnooman) and told the nurses “Don’t stick 'em.”
The only other memory I have from really early childhood, was the time that the bitchy neighbor tried to make me look stupid. My Mom was a proud parent, and told the evil lady that walked her dog by our house that I had a rather large vocabulary. Bitch lady saw that as a challenge, and defied me to say the name of her dog. It was Snuffaluffagus (I’ll be shocked if that’s not mispelled).
I heard the word, watched as bitch lady sneered, looked at my Mom who was expecting me to deliver, and did what I had to do. I said “kangaroo”, it was the largest, most recently learned word I knew. True, I failed, but at least I stood up to the local bitch lady. That’s all I got.
I think I started walking late–I don’t know what the normal age is, though. I’ve always been developmentally behind with physical coordination stuff. I learned to ride a bike when I was 7 or 8–tough stuff.
I started talking at a normalish age, but probably the most extraordinary thing is the age at which I learned to read. I was 3. I’ve talked to several people who knew me at this time (biased, admittedly: Mom, I’m looking at you) and they swear up and down that I didn’t learn to read like normal kids. They’d go over the alphabet and the letters with me and then one day my Mom walked into my bedroom and I was reading “like someone just flipped a switch.” Not basic stuff, but the book in question was “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.”: “Oh, no, Rudolph!” Santa said, “I need someone to drive my sleigh.” That kind of shit. At 3 years old. She thought I had just memorized it, but after shoving more and more books in my face she realized I was actually reading.
I was freakishly advanced with reading for a long time. When I was seven, my grandmother used me as her guinea pig for a high school standardized test in English and I tested beyond high school level for reading comprehension. I read “To Kill a Mockingbird” in fourth grade.
Then what happened? Kids caught up. The gap closed–I was still ahead in high school, but not by much. I had to work at it a little. Obviously I still have academic talent, especially with words, but I am not freakishly advanced. At my wonderful and academically rigorous university, I rate as maybe one standard deviation above the norm but I’m certainly not the best. Obviously other people on this board are more advanced with words than I am–I am basically normal for a smart person.
In a way I miss it (it’s fun rocking so hard at something others struggle to do) but on the other hand, it makes me calmer. It’s easier to fit in with people. And college is a challenge rather than a joke.
So yeah, I totally bragged right there. I know I’m not the only Doper on this board who can’t resist a good intellectual braggin’!
I think I started walking at about 9-10 months. I’m the first born, and my dad has a weird sense of humor. So he’d look at my little bald-headed self on a rug in the middle of the floor, and move a toy just out of reach, and watch me rockrockrock my way toward the toy. And then he’d move it a leetle further, and I’d rockrockrock on my tummy again…
And it moved to walking fairly early.
(And now I want to be a doctor. Wonder where that came from…rockrockrock until the next milestone…)
I don’t know when I started talking, but at a fairly young age my dad took me into McDonalds in his arms. He ordered his meal and then the girl behind the counter, in an effort to be sweet, turned to me and asked, “And what would you like?”
Not all of us can participate in polls about one’s offspring, but we can talk about our own feats. So let’s revisit dopers’ babyhoods for another poll.