I Saw the Sign

A topic of interest lately has been around Caiden's progress with his sign language skills. I am proud to report that he now has a signing vocabulary of 18 signs! I am continually amazed by his comprehension. He not only understands words, but concepts too. I have quickly learned that I am not only modeling items/words for him, but ideas, behaviors and other intangibles. And he is a quick study!

To date, Caiden knows the signs for:
bird, bye bye, vacuum, book, more, please, milk, banana, music, airplane, pacifier, flower, bath, eat/food, up, fish, all done/finished, and ball.

And it is much more than just a "sign on command" situation where I say "what's the word for book," and he tells me. He will come up to me and make the sign for book when he wants me to read to him. Or when we finish a book, he'll sign more and book to tell me he wants to read another one. Whenever he hears an airplane, he'll sign it to tell me what he is hearing. The same when he hears or sees a bird. He always asks for a banana at breakfast, and he tells us when he's all done with a certain food or his whole meal. And you may remember from the Dinner Time Jam video that at the very end you see Caiden sign more to ask B to sing again.

One thing I want to instill in him early on is good manners. I have been working with him to say please whenever he asks for something. He's gotten the hang of the sign, but I think he is still working on understanding just what it means. Whenever he wants anything he signs please, so it might be that he thinks this is how he asks for things. But he is now learning to not just ask for more, but more please. Or if he drops something and wants it back, he'll sign please. The other night, he just about broke my heart. He was getting overtired and cranky with B in the bath. He wanted to play with things that he couldn't have. By the time I was coming upstairs to put him to bed, B had him on the changing table and was finishing getting him dressed. Caiden desperately wanted the cap to an empty shampoo bottle, and he was crying his eyes out while continuously signing please please please! He was trying so hard to ask for this thing he wanted even tho play time was over, and it was time to go to sleep. Fortunately he was quickly distracted by his bedtime nursing session.

Outside of his signing vocab, he has also been growing his sounds vocab. In addition to telling you what cows, dogs and cats say, he now buzzes for bees, neighs for horses, ah-ahs for monkeys, roars (quietly) for lions, and vroom vrooms for cars.

It is so cool having him communicate back! We need to start learning more signs so he can broaden his vocabularly. We are the ones in danger of holding him back!! LOL!! If you are interested, you can check out some of the signs we are using with him here.