Babies are noisy creatures.
And I don't just mean the crying that everyone expects.
They grunt snort and snuffle in their cribs so that you would think they couldn't possibly still be asleep, but when you get up to check they're laying there peacefully.
Abbie is starting to display the beginnings of language too.
Every now and then we hear a coo mixed in with these newborn baby sounds.
But when we say 'baby talk' we're really talking about how grownups talk to and about babies.
I was surprised how quickly I began to develop my own words for things.
The icks rag, for example, means a square cloth nappy used to mop up baby vomit.
Drawing from the literature of my own childhood is the 'flopsy bunny' which now refers to the milk-drunk state you get after a feed.
Mum has contributed the 'chirpy bird' which I have adapted to 'chirpsy bird' to go with the flopsy bunny.
This relates to the face Abbie makes when she's hungry (the same face I made, apparently) she sticks her lips out in an O shape, forming a little beak, puffs her cheeks out and looks at you with big bright eyes while shaking her head a little from side to side.
The little tuft of golden (red) hair completes an image not to dissimilar to tweety bird.
When Abbie begins to talk, I'm sure our special family vocabulary will increase.
When I was little I dubbed the Sydney opera house the shell house and the wall unit in the living room, the wallnut, while hubby's family went to the zoo to see oompoompaloomps (elephants).
I can't wait to see what else we come up with.