I realize it hasn’t been that long since I did my original baby sign language post, but Peanut’s signing has exploded so I figured I’d do another post.
My favorite sign that she started doing is “I love you”. She mostly does it when people are saying bye to her and it makes me almost cry. It doesn’t look like the traditional “I love you” sign, but rather more like an L. I don’t think she has the pinky strength to hold it up on it’s own yet.
She also started signing cat and bird. Also Mommy and Daddy.
A lot of her signs are just mimicking me nowadays. If I do a sign and ask her to sign it, she’ll likely do something with her hands. That doesn’t mean that she’ll necessarily know what it means, do anything like it, or ever repeat it without me specifically asking. It’s still pretty cool though!
She probably has 15-20 signing words (I wish I kept better track) and she has 6 speaking words (Mama, Dada, Cat, Dog, Mum Mum, and Ya!). I think we’re finally seeing this more spoken words because of signing thing. I was concerned in my last post that Peanut spoke less because she didn’t have to speak. Now she has twice as many words as other kids her age.
If you want to sign with your kids, I definitely recommend taking a signing class together. We did Sign 2 Me because they use real sign language. It was at this class that I learned that Peanut really started signing at about 9-10 months, but I didn’t recognize it. We also made friends and were able to ask questions about signing. We saw a big difference in her interest in signing once we started the classes too. She instantly started signing more and paying more attention to the signs we were doing. I think it was helpful for her to see other people besides Mama and Dada signing. I also think that all the grandparents took it more seriously because we were taking the class. I honestly wanted to keep coming back, but we had completed the series and didn’t have money to take it again.
Do you have any questions about signing that I may be able to help you with? I want these posts to be more than updates, I want to have information that’s helpful for parents who want to sign with their kids.
Adventures of Lactating Girl 