Minor is talking a lot now. He has always been a pretty enthusiastic communicator, unlike Aitch. Aitch never hit any of those speech milestones on time, even the pre-verbal ones. He couldn’t be bothered with sign language. He wouldn’t even do those standard baby signs that every kid picks up — “so big,” hand clapping, bye-bye, and so forth. He did start talking at a typical age, but he was never that interested in it. If we said, “Say doggie!” he wouldn’t repeat it. (Don’t worry, though. He seems to have caught up. The other day, frustrated by a stuck zipper, he spontaneously exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” at the appropriate time. Imitation? Check.)

Minor was a delightful contrast. He caught on to signs right away and moved quickly to words. He seemed thrilled finally to have some method of communicating his many and nuanced demands. To our great shock, he learned words spontaneously, and when we specifically asked him to repeat words he thought it was a fun game. A few months ago, he started combining two words, a skill that eluded his brother until the two-year mark. The other day he pointed to the letter “S” on one of his brother’s trains and said, “Sssssss.” I realize that all of this is perfectly average, but after our experience with Aitch, Husband and I found it very precocious. The word “genius” was bandied about.

One thing that Minor doesn’t do well, though, is enunciate. Many words sound like some variation of “Buh,” even those that don’t start with B. “I love you” is “Buh boo,” and so on. This is also in contrast to Aitch, who may not have spoken early or often, but was always clear as a bell.

So when Minor repeats a word, it usually bears only a passing resemblance to its model. When he repeats a sound, though, he is spot on. If you sigh or groan or burp in front of him, you may be disconcerted to hear a tiny echo of your emission. He also imitates ambient noises, animals and machines and such. And when he walks backwards, he thoughtfully beeps like a truck — to alert the people behind him, I suppose, in case he can’t see us in his rear-view mirrors. I marvel that his mimicry skills are so poor with words and so great with other sounds. Maybe it’s the consonants, which are plentiful in the words but not so crucial in the sounds?

Tune in to Letterman in twenty years to see him demonstrating his prize-winning duck calls. Or, maybe, truck calls.