76) Two word sentence

AboutKidsHealth.ca has an article about the neurocognitive effects of leukemia treatment on a child. Neurocognition includes "language, memory, concentration, and ability to grasp new concepts". For the past week or two, I've been worrying that E may have a neurocognitive delay, specifically in language.

E is a smart little guy. We can show him flash cards of numbers from 0 to 10, and he will correctly verbally identify all of them. He knows colours, knows some shapes, and he has a lot of words, but he hasn't been putting them together in short 2 or 3 word sentences. E has a cousin who is 3 months older than him. I know it's not reasonable to directly compare them because at that age, 3 months is significant in terms of development. I'm not sure that E is at the language level his cousin was at, when his cousin was 2-and-a-half, but he has been recently starting to tell us when he's hungry instead of us guessing.

Fast forward to earlier this evening when I was giving E his bath. He had every bottle of soap, shampoo, conditioner, and bubblebath in the tub with him. He was lifting them up, one-by-one, onto the side of the tub, and we were counting them together. Eventually the water started to get cool, so I had to fish him out of the tub against his will. He was thrashing & yelling, trying to get away from me, but I was talking to him, telling him that the water was cold, and we were going to go and get dry. Out of nowhere, he yells "NO DRY!". I repeated my phrasing to him several more times, and each time, he responded to me with a clear "NO DRY!".

He actually made a two word sentence! I know it was what he was thinking because his thrashing and squirming told me that he was not ready to leave his bath. Hopefully it's the start of a breakthrough, and the little sentences start to increase exponentially. Still, it should be something we bring up with his oncology team in case he needs a little bit of help to get where he needs to be.