yeah we had a pediatrician give us a health index when our dd was 3, and one of the questions was, does your child point at things in books? and of course it was no, or 'not much' anyway. This is a red flag for poor development, but the pediatrician, knowing my daughter said, "so that is because she is just able to ask in full sentences 'what is that', right?" Doesn't need to point.
And yeah, that was why. So it is odd, but the pointing phase might have occurred for a bit much earlier and we just didn't notice.

Around 2 or so she was asking 'wha's dat?' over and over, it was amazing how often that would come out of her little mouth. Just building the huge vocab I guess.

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