Walking off a cliff of verbage

Around a month ago L and I started to be concerned about the girl's language development. Mostly it was that she could only say a few words, used them erratically and pretty much with only one syllable. It wasn't any red flag or anything, but better to be safe than sorry. I mean, she could certainly understand us – that's been clear for quite some time. It's just she would not say anything to make her needs known. So we decide to take her to the monthly Talking Walk In to have her checked out by a professional.

The next session was 3 weeks away.

About a week after we made that decision she started adding a new word roughly every day. Plus she started being able to make new sounds like L and K. Not only did she have new words and sounds, but she started to be able to use them in useful way. Stuff like

• help
• please
• book – give me that book to read or read me that book
• cup – I want water
• shower I want to bathe
• back – take this away or I want to be someplace I was earlier or just give me that thing I had earlier
• sock / boot – as in,give me the... or take this ... off me
• panda – she carries around this tiny stuffed panda everywhere. She says this over and over if she can see it and she wants it. It came with a small book, and occasionally she calls the book panda too
• tissue – please wipe my nose
• bag
• bed
• cot
• bees – she has this bee mobile she's fond of
• oh – that's surprising
• teeth
• wet – Oops. I've missed.
• seat / sit – Usually with tapping next to her please sit next to me, though sometimes it's I want to sit there.
• talk – Oooh Skype. I want to talk.
• watch – Is that Youtube/iPlayer? Can I see?
• walk – I want to go outside
• up – lift me up, she also says this when walking up the stairs
• down – She repeats this when walking down stairs
• dark – I notice you just turned out the lights
• light – please hand me / turn on the light
• bucket – she has a toy pail she likes to play with
• and occasionally she says what sounds like bog when she needs the loo.

On top of that, hello, water, dog are now quite distinct. She even has fun repeating duck and dog over and over making sure the words are sufficiently different. Same thing with keys and cheese, though less often (she really likes cheese, but she also really likes playing with keys – I'm not sure which she likes more)
She can say cat, but recently has tended not to in favour a sad, plaintive mewing noise she obviously picked up from her time spent with friends' cats.

Anyway, back to the point of this post… Over that three week period she started saying more and more. To the point that when she babbles, we can catch some sense in there as often as not. Two days before we were due to take her in, on a whim I decided to recite the alphabet to her:

A — ay
B — beeeeee
C — ceee
D — dee
E — əə
F — eh
G — Jee
H — ay
…and so on, for the full alphabet. We got to the end and she'd managed all but a few letters. L looked at me and asked Do we really need to take her to be checked out?
At which point we decided that if she wasn't on track, she was coming along nicely. It's weird how it seems to have exploded from almost nothing to almost practical in such a short period of time. Brains are fascinating.