I love languages. I took ASL 101 and 102 at BYU. They were really fun. Danny and I decided to teach Jane some signs while she is little.
The reasons Danny and I chose to do this has nothing to do with the desire to be trendy, although Baby Signing's popularity in the past 10 years is really helpful in terms of material available. We're also not in any way fanatic or exclusive about it. We only sign some signs consistently, not every word. And we always say the word as well.
There's a million reasons to sign with your baby. The main reason that motivates me is the thought of having two under two here in not very long. It will be nice to have Jane able to communicate at least a little, so that we can better meet her needs at the same time as the needy newborns'.
Jane's first sign was "milk". We weren't totally sure if she was really signing, or what. And actually, it's still very hard to determine if what she's doing is a sign or just waving her hands. Harder than that is trying to interpret which sign she's doing; sometimes we know she's signing something to us, trying desperately to say something, but we have no idea because it's indistinct and looks just like she's waving her hands.
But here is a list of all the signs that she has, to date, explicitly been able to sign:
milk
fan
light
diaper
music
more
thunder
water
rain
bird
all done! (this was a huge development. She just started signing this today, and boy was it helpful!)
good job!
Here are the signs I'm working on with her:
careful!
swimming
bath
no
yes
cracker
gentle/soft
come here
stop
nap/sleep
hurt
baby - she recognizes this sign, but does not yet do it back
funny/silly
wait
She also says one word - sort of. Whenever she hears or sees a dog, she says, "D-DAH! D-DAH! D-DAH!" over and over and over. It's quite hilarious. I will take her to the dog park sometime, and she will probably be in heaven.
But no, actually owning a dog is totally out of the question in the foreseeable future. I shouldn't say NEVER because I convinced my anti-dog parents to get one eventually...but for now, our family has kids, not pets. Ha, look at the state of my garden and you'll see how responsible I am at caring for non-related living things! Actually, don't, please.
I have found "please" and "thank you" to be the most useful signs. Once they know please I can ask them different things they might want and the one they want they will sign "please". It's pretty easy to recognize and sign. I find it also really cuts down on whining and crying for things, which when I am tired really helps with my sanity.
ReplyDeleteHey so, I totally took your comment to heart and have been working on "please" and "thank you" with Jane now for a few weeks. It was kind of discouraging at first; we've mostly been doing signs with specific actions or nouns. Please is more of a concept, and it's taken what felt like forever of me repeating the sign over and over for her to finally catch on. But she has in the last few days, and IT IS SO GREAT! You are totally right about it cutting down on the whining. The only "downside" is that it's really hard to say "no" when she holds up "Go Dog Go" for the tenth time in one day, signing, "book please!" Seriously though, what do you do when they sign "please" and you have to say no?
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