We're very lucky.
Jack is the sort of child
we all assume we'll have
when we decide to have children,
and the sort of child
less experienced parents
congratulate themselves for.January and February 2004
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Thursday, Feb. 05, 2004 - Mamma
Jack has become an increasingly communicative little guy.
He was never one to leave his opinion open for guessing, but in the last week or so, he has gone from having pretty much two modes of expression (giggles and screeches) to having quite a repetoire.
Because it is likely to be another year before Jack is ready to start communicating verbally, we read up on Baby Signs -- the concept being that babies have fully formed thoughts long before they have the verbal mastery to express those thoughts. Experience with the babies of the deaf community also taught that babies also develop the physical ability to sign long before they can speak. Not only does this reduce baby's frustration at being unable to communicate effectively, but it also increases baby's eventual spoken vocabulary, since they get "language practice" so much younger than they would have otherwise. So there has been a movement for the last 10 or 15 years to teach little ones to use signs to communicate. Most babies start being able to use them at about 9 months.
Jack, it seems, was a wee bit ahead of himself. He started using "bye", "come here/give it to me" (the same sign) and "feed me" by about 7 months -- but then he stalled. Lately, though, he has been using his signs a lot more enthusiastically and more frequently. Time to add some new signs, I think!
Of course, he is also making vast strides in his verbal skills. He has a "word" for "bicky" (cookie, cracker, etc) and "cat", and "clock". They all sound the same--but he uses them pretty consistently.
Today he added another sound that is clearly significant to him, though we haven't figured out what it means yet. It will be fun to see what that means.
