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                    ``The Straight Poop on Heather''

   1 March 1995                                       Vol. 1, No. 6
   Editor-in-chief: Heather      Contributing Editors: John & Marie
                                         Fashion Editor: Aunt Susan
     

                     !!! FLASH !!! NEWS ALERT !!!

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           ***              EXTRA! EXTRA!                 ***
           ***            READ ALL ABOUT IT!              ***
           ***          AMAZING SPEAKING BABY!            ***
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Heather has invented speech!  That's right, our budding Shakespeare
has joined the ranks of the verbally endowed.  The first word is (drum
roll, please):  " cracker " .  But she pronounces it more like "gakka."
(Or maybe "dappa."  Or it could be "<cough>aka."  That first consonant
is kind of a weird glottal sound, and the second one isn't much more
recognizable.  Vowel pronunciation is significantly better, though
still suboptimal.  We're working on it.)

So how do we know it's an actual word and not just a random collection
of sounds?  Several factors led us to draw this conclusion, which was
reached only on the second occasion she actually used the word -- so
although she *said* it first on Monday (or at least I noticed it first
then), we didn't actually confirm it until yesterday.

    1. She's never made a sound quite like this before, during
    	random babbling (of which there is plenty).
    2. Yesterday after day care she was cranky and hungry, and
    	when I took her to the car I got out the bag of crackers from
    	her diaper bag.  She said it then.
    3. When I looked at her and asked in surprise "do you want a
    	cracker, Heather?  Cracker?"  she looked up at me, looked
    	back at the bag, and said "gakka!" a couple more times.
    4. When I delayed giving her the cracker by a few more seconds,
    	trying to get her to say it again, she got *really* mad.
    5. As soon as I took out a cracker, she stopped crying, grabbed
    	it, and chowed down.

She repeated this sequence again for John, and he confirmed that in
fact she was saying the "gakka" word in response to the crackers.  She
did it a couple more times at dinner.

This is really neat.  This is cool.  This is about as amazing a
phenomenon as has ever happened in the history of humankind.

Regular issue of the Press coming out soon -- this couldn't wait!