Part 2: My Daughter’s First Word Wasn’t “Mama” or “Dada” — It Was the Name of the 80-Pound Golden Who Had Slept Beside Her Crib Since the Day We Brought Her Home
We brought Lila home from Wake Med Hospital on a Wednesday afternoon in late January.
Drew carried the car seat in first. I followed. Buddy was waiting at the door in the gentle alert posture of a dog who had heard the car pull up and knew something was different.
Drew set the car seat down on our living room rug, very carefully, and unbuckled Lila — five days old, six pounds eleven ounces, a tiny purple raisin of a person.
Buddy walked over.
He did not jump. He did not lick. He did not whine.
He sat down next to the car seat. He lowered his head until his nose was about three inches from Lila’s foot. He sniffed the bottom of her tiny sock for about ten seconds.
Then he stood up, walked over to the corner of the living room where his bed had been for four years, picked up the bed in his teeth, dragged it across the floor, and dropped it next to the bassinet we had set up by our couch.
He lay down on the bed.
He looked at us.
Drew said, very quietly, “Okay.”
That was the first night.
For the next fourteen months, Buddy slept next to Lila.
Not in our bedroom. Not in his old corner. He moved his bed wherever Lila was. When she slept in the bassinet by the couch, he slept by the bassinet. When she moved to the crib in the nursery, he slept on the rug next to the crib. When she got too big for the crib at thirteen months and we transitioned her to a toddler bed, he slept on the rug next to that.
He did not howl when she cried at night. He did not bark when she woke us up at 3 a.m. He simply got up, walked over to whichever parent was on duty, gently nudged our hand with his nose, and lay back down.
In the mornings — and this is the part I am writing about — Buddy was always the first thing Lila saw.
When she opened her eyes at 6:30 or 7 a.m., he was there. His big honey-colored face about eighteen inches from hers, lying on his rug. He would lift his head when she stirred. He would watch her wake up. He would wait.
I would come in, lift her out of bed, change her diaper, and carry her to the kitchen. Buddy would walk behind us at a polite distance.
Drew and I have a thousand photographs of those first mornings. They are mostly identical. Lila’s small face, slightly puffy from sleep, looking past my shoulder at a Golden Retriever who is looking back at her with the steady patient face of a creature who has been watching her sleep for the last seven hours.
We thought it was sweet.
We did not yet understand what was happening in her brain.
I will tell you about the language thing because I am a research librarian — that is what I do for a living, I look up information for people at the Wake County Public Library — and so when our pediatrician told us at twelve months that Lila had not started saying “Mama” or “Dada” yet but was babbling normally and we should not worry, I went home and I read everything.
What I learned is this: babies map their first words to the things they pay the most concentrated attention to. The first word a child says is, almost without exception, the thing they have stared at the most.
It is not always the parent.
It is sometimes a sibling. A pet. A favorite toy. A ceiling fan, in one published case study from 2017, in a child who lived in a house with three powerful overhead fans she watched every night before falling asleep.
Lila was being raised in a house where the first thing she saw every single morning, for the first fourteen months of her life, was an eighty-pound Golden Retriever’s face about eighteen inches from her own.
She was being raised in a house where her father and I were also there, of course, and we held her and fed her and bathed her and rocked her — but we did so in motion. We came in and out of rooms. We picked her up. We put her down. We were not, in her growing visual world, a constant.
Buddy was the constant.
Buddy was the still, warm, breathing landmark of every room she was in.
Drew started saying “Mama” to her at four months old. I started saying “Dada” to her at six months old. We said both words approximately five thousand times each before she turned a year old.
She watched us. She listened. She babbled.
She did not say either word.
At thirteen months, our pediatrician said, “First words can come anytime between ten and eighteen months. Don’t push it. She’ll talk when she’s ready.”
At fourteen months, on a Sunday morning in late March, I was standing in the kitchen pouring coffee. Drew was at the table eating a bagel. Lila was in her highchair eating Cheerios. Buddy was lying on the kitchen tile next to her highchair, in his eternal position, watching for any Cheerio that might descend from above.
Lila reached down with one small fist and dropped a Cheerio on the floor on purpose. Buddy hoovered it up.
Lila, very clearly, looked down at him and said:
“Buddy.”
She said it again. “Buddy.”
She said it a third time, louder, with a giant gap-toothed grin: “BUDDY.”
Drew dropped his bagel.
I dropped the coffee pot.
Buddy looked up at her and his tail thumped twice against the kitchen tile.
I sat down on the kitchen floor. I started laughing. Then I started crying. Then I started laughing again, and Drew said, “Honey. Are you — are you okay?”
I pointed at the dog.
I said, “Drew. Her first word.”
Drew sat very still for about ten seconds.
Then he said, “Are you kidding me.”
I said, “It’s the dog, honey.”
He said, “It’s the dog?“
I said, “It’s the dog.”
He stared at Buddy.
Buddy, sensing he was being looked at, thumped his tail again.
Lila looked at her father. She pointed at Buddy with one Cheerio-covered finger. She said, very clearly:
“Buddy.”
Drew put his head down on the kitchen table.
He stayed there for about thirty seconds.
I genuinely could not tell, in those thirty seconds, whether he was going to cry, laugh, or fake-strangle the dog in front of our daughter.
When he lifted his head, his eyes were a little red.
He said, “Janelle. She knows my name. I know she knows my name. She’s been ignoring me on purpose for fourteen months.”
I said, “Honey.”
He said, “I have been Daddy-ing her for over a year. I have been chest-to-chest with this baby. I have changed three thousand diapers.”
He looked at Buddy.
He said, “Buddy. We need to talk.”
Buddy walked over to him.
Drew put his hand on Buddy’s head. He scratched behind Buddy’s ear. He sighed.
Then he said, with the kind of grace I do not know how I got lucky enough to marry, “All right. You won. Fair and square.”
He looked at me.
He said, “Get me my phone.”
I got him his phone.
He spent the next two hours editing.
That night, at 9:47 p.m., my husband Drew Holcombe — a man who had spent a year and a half preparing for this baby to call him Daddy and had been beaten to the punch by an eighty-pound dog — posted a thirty-second video to his Facebook page.
The video was of Lila in her crib, asleep, with Buddy curled on the rug beside her with his chin on the crib bar. The light was the soft blue light of a baby monitor camera. Lila’s small breathing was audible. So was Buddy’s slower one.
The caption Drew typed under it was:
Today my fourteen-month-old daughter said her first word. It wasn’t “Dada.” It wasn’t “Mama.” It was “Buddy.”
To my dog: you won. Fair and square. I have been here every morning. I have been here every night. I have changed approximately three thousand diapers. You have done none of that. You just looked at her.
Apparently that was enough.
Welcome to the family, buddy. Officially. I guess you were always here first.
It got two thousand shares overnight.
I was up at 2:30 a.m. nursing Lila when the post hit a thousand shares.
I scrolled through the comments on my phone with one hand. They were what you would imagine — laughing emoji, dog photos, people saying the same thing had happened to them with a cat or a brother or a grandmother.
Then I found a comment from a woman named Greta Halverson.
She wrote: Hi. I’m a developmental pediatrician at UNC Chapel Hill. I want to tell you something that you may not realize about what just happened to your daughter.
Babies don’t say their first word about the person who loves them most. They say it about the person they have visually attached to. Visual attachment in infants is built primarily through the first thing they see in the morning, repeatedly, for the first year of life. This is called “morning anchoring” in some of the literature.
If your dog has been the first thing your daughter saw every morning since she came home from the hospital, your dog is, neurologically, a primary attachment figure. Not the only one — but a deep one. Probably the deepest constant in her sensory world.
This isn’t a story about a dog being cute. This is a story about a dog showing up, every single morning at six a.m., for fourteen months, without being asked. That’s how primary attachments are built. Not by intensity. By steadiness.
She didn’t say his name to be funny. She said his name because his face is, to her, the shape of safety. And the first word a child speaks is almost always the shape of safety.
Tell your husband he didn’t lose. Tell him she got to “Dada” and “Mama” because the dog made the world feel safe enough to let those words come out next.
I read that comment three times.
I woke up Drew.
I made him read it.
He read it twice.
Then he sat in our bed at 2:47 a.m. with our daughter asleep on my chest and our dog asleep on the rug, and he said, very quietly, “Janelle. I take it back.”
I said, “Take what back?”
He said, “I take back the fair and square.“
He said, “He didn’t beat me. He held the door for me.”
It has been four months since that Sunday morning in the kitchen.
Lila is sixteen months old now.
She says “Buddy” about forty times a day.
She also says “Mama” — which she figured out about a week after Buddy.
She also says “Dada” — which she figured out three days after Mama.
Drew claims this still counts as third place. He is officially over it. He tells the story at every dinner party. He takes the photo down off our fridge and shows it to people. The photo is of Lila in her highchair pointing at Buddy with a Cheerio finger.
Drew starts every showing of the photo with the same line.
He says, “This is the moment my dog beat me to my own kid’s first word.”
Then he laughs. He always laughs.
Then he scratches Buddy’s ear.
Buddy thumps his tail.
Last week Lila started a new thing.
When she wakes up in the morning, before I come in to get her, she sits up in her toddler bed and looks down at the rug.
Buddy is there.
Lila says, “Buddy.”
Buddy gets up, walks to the side of the bed, and presses his big honey-colored forehead against her small one.
She giggles.
She says it again. “Buddy.”
Then she says, “Mama.”
Then she says, “Dada.”
In that order. Every single morning. She has decided this is the order.
I stand in the hallway and listen.
I do not interrupt.
I do not correct.
It is the order.
It will always be the order.
He was here first.
If you want to see Buddy now — the way he still walks behind her, the way he picks up every Cheerio she drops, the way his tail still thumps when she says his name — I’ve shared his latest video in the comments.
