Baby Signing and Her First use of Manners and an Almost Sentence!!

by Sara Butko
(Oak Harbor, WA, USA)

One of my daughter's friends who is 6 months older than her was using sign language with her mommy, so I decided to try look it up and try it out.

I found this site right before xmas, my daughter, Joella was 8 months old at the time.

I started trying to teach her and her Daddy all kinds of words. I looked up every word I could find that might come up in my daughter's day.

Ball, more, please, eat, drink, etc. Then everytime I saw a word I could sign i would stop both Joella and Daddy and show them how to sign it even if it is one I already showed them.

Within a few days Daddy had picked up a few and joined in or occasionally asked how to sign something, if I knew i would show him if not I would look it up as soom as possible.

Grandpop even joined in when he would visit, he was very eager to learn sign language and challenged me to find more words.

By the new year she knew milk even tho she knew it as "boobie" since we bf. I didn't like the sign for BF so we use milk, which was very easy for her to grasp.

At this point she was no longer allowed to BF unless she sign for it. Her next word was more, and soon after came eat.

Around her first birthday, the end of March, she started signing please. Now i started inforcing eat please and more eat please.

Within a few weeks she was asking for eat and milk politely. About a month ago she started saying and signing ball and them about a few week ago she asked while signing ball please, i have never signed please with anything but milk, eat and more but I do try to use it a lot.

So I was very happy to see that my good manners were rubbing off on my 16 month old. Joella uses please a lot now I just have to work on a few more things she can sign for so I know what she is asking for when it is not one she can sign or say.

But I am sure sign language will continue to help us communicate more and more.