Talk Is Cheep (Cheep, Cheep)

It seems like Joey the duck triples in size each night while we're sleeping. S/he is big and fluffy and happy and getting what appear to be brown feathers, so maybe we won't have just a garden variety, white, Pekin duck, after all. Pippin is also filling out nicely with white, black, and brown feathers. We still don't know what breed she is yet, but she does appear to be staying female. Here's a current photo of the two birdie pals, and if you look closely, you can see Pippin's fun leg feathers.


The two feathered friends cheep happily to each other all day, in chorus with Imogen's new found skill at babbling, which you can listen to here.



The three of them babbling and chirping all day reminded me of a great interview I heard on NPR's Fresh Air a few years back about how baby birds babble parts of their parents' songs just like human babies learn to talk by babbling first. You can listen to the interview here. The part about babbling is about 7 minutes in if you don't have time to listen to the whole piece.

All this babbling (joined of course by Elliot's non-stop narration of elevator rides and Blues Clues) also made me think about Amanda Baggs, a woman with autism who is changing the way people think about individuals with autism. You can watch her amazing video of herself, In My Language, here. Ms. Baggs is nonverbal and uses a computer to narrate what is going on in her head while she goes through her self-soothing behaviors in the video.

Which just goes to show you, it's near impossible to know what's going on inside someone's head - who's in there - if you don't speak his or her language, be it a baby bird, an infant, or a person with autism. That's one reason I really like one of the new catch phrases out there about autism, which is "Autism: it's not like you think".