Word Count

As a PhD student, the number 100,000 is regularly on my mind. No, that's certainly not how many dollars per year I'll be making if I can land a job as a theology professor. But it is the maximum number of words I'm allowed for my dissertation. It may sound like a lot (and, I guess it is) but the usual problem is having too many words, not too few. I'm finishing up an essay right now that's around 19,000 words. I don't think it's important enough to make up 1/5 of my dissertation. Maybe I'm just wordy.

Anyway, I know you're here to read about Ellie, not me. So I thought we'd try to count her "words". Imagine our surprise when I had casually remarked that I thought she knew about 40 signs, but when we counted them up this evening, we came up with 58! And we may have missed a few.... Most are official American Sign Language (with slight "baby talk" variations), but some of them she's made up on her own. And there are some we're still trying to figure out what in the world she means!

For the record, here's the list. If you think there's anything missing from the list that a baby (oops...a toddler!) would want to say, please let us know!

Animals	Things	Foods	Actions
dog cat sheep pig frog bird giraffe bee monkey rabbit horse bear butterfly fish mouse lion	flower pen eye hand hat phone book shoes hair sand baby ball balloon keys	banana apple strawberry cereal tomato cheese grapes milk pizza egg carrot peas	more all done eat sleep bath help brush teeth thank you/please where drink swing up down sling sunscreen gentle

She can also do a few words vocally, including: Apple, Up, Pat (as in "Pat, Pat, Pat" a bucket full of sand), Ellie, Mummy, Daddy, Hi-Ya, Hey-You, and Bye-Bye. To round off her list, she does four animal sounds: Mooooo, Baaaaa, Woof, and Meow!