Sign O' The Times

Dear Laney,

There are a lot of people who think it's beneficial to teach your baby some rudimentary sign language to help with intra-family communication. I was not one of those people. I thought, "She already doesn't want to talk - ever - and if I teach her sign language, she'll use it like a crutch and never talk."

But then I showed you the sign for "down," and you adopted it immediately, and it made life so much easier, knowing when you wanted to get down from the step stool vs. watching you try to jump off.

Last week, I picked you up from day care, and your teacher told me that she had taught you the sign for "More." Conveniently, she taught you this sign on Pizza Day, so you got a lot of use out of it right away. Miss Tracy suggested I was wrong about sign language, and that giving you a new form of communication would build your confidence and give you an "early win" that would inspire you to keep communicating. Well, color me wrong.

So I went to the library and checked out The Idiot's Guide to Baby Sign Language. In the first weekend, I taught you six signs. The one you use the most is "Help," like when you drag over a five pound bag of prunes, hand it to me and sign "Help," as in "Help me open this big-ass bag of prunes." I'm always torn: I think it's a great idea to reward your initiative, but I think it's a bad idea to give you 800% of your daily recommended allowance of fiber.

Anyway, here are a few of the signs you like to use these days:

Side note: The brown marks on the bottom half of your face and shirt are chocolate. The brown mark in the middle of your forehead is a bruise caused by you banging your head on the kitchen counter when I told you you couldn't use a steak knife to help me make a salad.

Love,

Mom