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Proud Momma of a signing baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At ten and a half months my child has over fifteen baby signs. Hooray.

So far these are the concepts and words she can communicate:

  1. toilet
  2. ceiling fan (oh, the joy!)
  3. light/lamp
  4. duck (duck, duck, DUCK!!)
  5. fish
  6. airplane
  7. monkey (accompanied by enthusiastic monkey sound)
  8. all done/enough/finished
  9. car (she is working on this one)
  10. swings (Anya invented her own sign for swings – her favourite thing)
  11. TV (okay this one is a bit dodgy and looks like ‘duck’)
  12. dog
  13. bird (… also looks a bit like sign for ‘duck’)
  14. baby (one armed, but essentially a valid sign)
  15. more
  16. milk (by far the most used of all signs – oh, man, I am a slave to this sign!!)

Yay! Those are the ones I can remember, now, anyway… Most of them are for fun and so we can hold a ‘conversation’ about what we are seeing in the world; but signs like ‘more’, ‘milk’ and ‘all done’ are life changing. Of course she also does the usual pointing, waving, clapping, etc, which are all pretty cool and expressive ‘signs’, too.

Meanwhile, there are probably other things Anya is trying to sign to us which we haven’t yet clicked are signs (sometimes they are a little hard to recognise at first :p ) She also has a slowly growing repertoire of words or, in most case, animal sounds, like ‘mia’ for cat. This is such a fun development to watch, our kids naming and sharing their enthusiasm for what they see, like and want.

It is very interesting to observe that she seems to learn them in spurts. She learnt the first four almost all at once, then none for a while with just a few here and there, after; and now five new signs in the last few days.

I should say, if I haven’t before, that I started teaching Anya some first signs when she was six months old and I didn’t get anything signed back to me until she was nine months old – just when I was beginning to think it would never work!… which probably explains part of why I am so ecstatic, now.

Are you teaching your kids signing? How is it going?

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P.S. Sorry about repeat photo… haven’t had time for much photography, recently. Soon, soon, perhaps.

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