Chatty Kid

I'm going to gush about my latest hobby: baby sign language. Those of you have been around us in the last, oh, 14 months will know something about this already. Since Sam was about 6 months old, we've been using Baby Signs (here's a link to the book), which is a simplified form of sign language geared towards pre-verbal infants. For the better part of a year, we made idiots of ourselves by desperately repeating words such as "water! water!" while gesturing madly, while Sam would stare at us blankly. Well, to those of you who thought we were losing our minds, I am happy to report that Sam is now a fully signing kid.

Ok, before the non-parent contingent in our blog audience roll their collective eyes and say "oh god, another guy awash in parental hormones going on about how brilliant his kid is", let me say that according to the book, Sam is pretty much middle-of-the-pack. But two things thrill me about this: the fact that we have a full two-way communication happening, and just how cool the "Baby Sign" system is.

The principle is that pre-verbal babies have cognitive language facilities, but the inability to control the tongue and voicebox. Therefore, they've got stuff to say, they know what it should sound like, but they just can't get it out intelligibly. However, manual dexterity develops much earlier than verbal dexterity: thus the hand signs.

In practice, it's basic common sense: you repeat the word while performing the sign. Eventually the kid picks it up & starts performing the sign themselves.

Here is a sample of Sam in action:

"Moon". Hand extended upwards, making small circles

"Cat". Fingers across cheek, tracing whiskers. (Sam makes it more like fangs coming out of the mouth, which makes perfect sense if you know our cat Misho)

"Frog". Tongue sticking out.

Once you get it going, you realize how much is going on in those heads. Sam is almost hungry to express his experiences, and a walk or read involves him constantly relating what he's seeing. It's not Shakespeare: mostly just labelling what he sees ("bird! moon!"), but really—isn't that what most of our verbal activity is about?

A nice side effect which we were hoping for: there are signs for emotions, which seem to help limit the infamous tantrums—which are frustrated attempts at communicating. Sam had started to blow hissy fits, so we taught him the signs for "angry", "sad", and "scared". When he starts to get frustrated, we ask him about what is going on, and he tells us. I swear, not one tantrum since. And that, my friends, is a huge relief.

And it's almost scary how quickly the rolling ball starts to pick up speed: Sam's learning almost a sign every day or two, and now expects a sign for items of interest. Like everything, our language is negotiated: he didn't like the standard sign for fish and would shake his head vigourously every time I did it (too close to "book" for his liking). So I had to come up with a new one—it remains a work in progress.

As of this writing, here is a sample of the vocab currently in use: more, no more/all done, cat, dog, car, moon, horse, hungry/eat, milk, frog, bird, airplane, angry, scared, water/drink, book, "itsy bitsy spider", giraffe.

Incidentally, you know the first thing that Sam did when he found he could communicate? He LIED!