Toads-in-the-Hole

Adelaide suddenly has a vocabulary of ten. After an anxious time from months nine to twelve (anxious for me, Aimee is always entirely sanguine about Adelaide’s development) in which she babbled a great deal but said little that we could understand as speech, words now have begun to pop out of her mouth at a rate of two or three per week. Her spoken vocabulary now includes Dada (even though I still refer to myself as “Papa”), Cat, Doll, Dog, Car, Cow, Ball, and Adelaide also uses American Sign Language to say Bird, Milk and the all-important trio of Eat, More, and All Done.

In the picture she may look like she's simply gesturing vaguely to her mouth, but I assure that she is quite seriously stating her desire to EAT.

She actually has a few more signs, reproducing Cat, Ball, Dog, and occasionally perhaps Yes, Wash Hands, and Bath. The sign language comes thanks to the television series Signing Time, DVDs of which we found at the library and now watch nearly every day. Signing Time features a mom, her non-hearing child Leah, and Leah’s hearing cousin Alex, along with a cast of signing kids. The format is pretty simple, in each segment a word is introduced by painfully cheap computer animation, and appears in letters and Alex says it out loud, then Leah’s mom clearly demonstrates the sign, then Alex and Leah act out a scenario in which the word is used (e.g. Leah is reading a book and Alex wants to see it, so she asks him if he has Washed his Hands), and, to conclude, clips of home movies show a bunch of different kids more or less reproducing the sign. It is this last that Adelaide loves the most. Some of the kids play with balls, eat things, or, best of all, play with dogs, and Adelaide watches wide-eyed.

If we start the DVD up in the living room, she’ll come running (well, okay, crawling swiftly) from another room, insist I sit down on the carpet, and crawl into my lap to watch. I’m a little freaked out that she’s so addicted to a TV show, but I love hearing her words and seeing her signs. The idea is that she’ll be able to communicate with hand-signed words long before her mouth is nimble enough to pronounce them. This will encourage her to learn more words, enable her to communicate with us, and avoid frustration in our relationship. The Terrible Twos, I’ve read, are largely due to children being unable to get their point across. Thanks to her new skills Adelaide can, instead of shrieking, reliably sign More to Eat.

I'm continually finding new Very Favorite Things about Adelaide. Currently, my Very Favorite Thing is when Adelaide, by way of making conversation, holds up her toy and remarks, "Cow!"