My baby has spoken her first word – and this proud ‘dada’ is making the most of it

‘I watch my daughter as ‘dada’ morphs into the occasional ‘baba’ and ‘gugug’ makes its first few appearances.’ Photograph: Insung Jeon/Getty Images

My daughter, being one-year-old, mostly keeps her thoughts to herself. I won the battle of the primordial syllables so, for the past two months, the only word she’s said is ‘dada’, a small consolation for the fact that, like her older brother, she vastly prefers her mother’s company to my own.

Her refusal to say ‘Mama’ appears to be an accident of speech and her obsessive repetitions of ‘dada’ are about as meaningful as they would be if she said the name of our local Amazon delivery man 4,000 times a day, but I’ll take the victories where they come.