Hakeem is 22 months old and he hasn’t started stringing two words together. I have to be honest, I was quite worried. I see kids his age already communicating with two or more words. So I looked it up.. In my first rounds of research, call it selective reading but, all I could read was that they should be talking at this age and that a lot of mummies have gone for early intervention for their late-talking babies and that it had helped immensely.
So being a mom, I panicked a bit. First thing I did was contact my cousin who is knowledgable in early intervention and asked for therapists’ contacts. And then I shared my concern with Hafidz and warned him against using the typical doctor’s phrase, “Should be okay tu..” even though I know that might be true. Haha.
Alhamdulillah, he heeded my warning and started formulating a plan with me. He said that we should wait until he is two years old before we take Hakeem to the developmental delays clinic to get his speech assessed. We also decided that we need to spend more time and interact with him instead of merely being in the same room with us on our respective laptops all the time! Oh and also to severely cut down on TV (the so called “one-eyed babysitter”) time. Hafidz came home with these new educational tools!
All from Icklebooks! 
And I also got a reply from my cousin who also assured me that 22 months is a bit too young to tell especially for a boy. She also advised that as long as he is receptive and understands what we are telling him, he should be fine and that he’ll talk soon. She thinks maybe Hakeem is just a quiet person or more of a thinker personality wise and I think she may be right!
Anyways, I shouldn’t have worried so much because he’s not even two years old so he shouldn’t be expected to pronounce words correctly yet. And plus, all babies are different and most of the babies I’ve compared him to are girls (like his Kaka Aisya!) and they say girls talk a lot sooner than boys (we really start early, don’t we?).
And anyways, as soon as we taught him all his new flashcards and read him his books and started spending more time interacting with him, he suddenly became all talkative and bibiran!
