Tentative and experimental at first, your growls grew certain and purposeful throughout the week. Guttural and scratching at your vocal cords, this new muscular stretch took the place of all other communication. Squeaking, squeals, and other happy baby sounds stepped aside, curiosity and perhaps not a little fear creasing their innocent lingual foreheads. Your sentences devolved into grunts, and only became sentences again as you strung several grunts together. A smiling sense of accomplishment punctuated each growl. These were no longer incidental strands of vowels, but declarations, imperatives. Growling required air. It required lung capacity. Words gained a greater sense of economy than they'd known up to this point. You stopped complaining helplessly and instead gave your mom and dad instructions. "These are your marching orders," you growled. "Do it. Do it now."
And as suddenly as the growls had arrived, the growls disappeared. Your dad, confused, continued to growl playfully back at you. You laughed at him. He was, perhaps, entertaining. But the growls had become a past amusement for you. Something you'd started at the three-and-a-half month mark, but by three-and-three-quarter months, growling had slipped into a past-tense realm. You'd mastered growling. There was nothing more for you to learn. "Stop it, dad," you seemed to say, no longer growling, but maintaining your increased confidence that growling had brought. "I don't do that anymore." You humored your dad for a couple more days, giggling at his growls during bath time, or maybe eliciting a chuckle or two during some span of minutes on the Table of Awareness. But then it wasn't funny anymore. Dad would have to grow up. There's still so much to learn. Have to keep moving.
