Sign Language

Since before I was pregnant I said that if/when we had a child I was going to teach them sign language. All of the books say that it helps children who aren't old enough to talk yet, tell you what they want, thereby there's less crying. How awesome is THAT? I'm totally sold. Sign me up. My baby's going to sign. Yep.

Ok. So it's not that easy. We're trying. So far Katherine knows maybe three signs. Allow me to elaborate.

Sign #1: Waving. Check... got it. We wave to ourselves, wave to others and generally think waving is just fun.

Sign #2: Clapping. Okay, so it's not quite a sign but if you say YAY!!! She'll clap. With a big goofy grin, just like her Daddy. Who wouldn't melt at that?

Sign #3: The bird. No, not as in cute tweet tweet, birdie. I'm talking - THE BIRD. As you can imagine, this is not one we're proud of. Not one I'm even sure is a "sign". At least we hope not. You see, Katherine points with her middle finger. And she likes to point. Particularly at people. Last weekend we were running. Katherine in her sporty new stroller, Mommy pushing said sporty new stroller with my cool Nike+Sport... woohoo... Diggin it... Can't breathe... but we're both happy. Then it happens. Katherine starts pointing as people go by. The lake we were running at is quite busy on a Saturday morning. There were lots and lots of people to "point" at. UG. Reactions ranged from looks like "did that kid just give me the finger?" to laughing to "I'm reporting that mother for sign language abuse."

I've tried to show her how to use her pointer finger. She just sticks the middle finger right back up. I've decided now I'm going to ignore it. I'm enacting the age old parent rule of - if you pay attention she'll continue to do it because you're drawing attention to it. So I ignore (and pray) that she'll learn to point with the appropriate (pointer) finger.

In other news, Katherine had her first sleep-over!!! So I may be stretching that a bit. Her big cousin Kyla (19months) stopped by to catch some zzzz's on the way to Florida from Pennsylvania. Kyla brought Aunt Betsy and Uncle Ron with her. The girls had a grand time playing. I didn't get pictures of the "play" as I was busy trying to teach Katherine to share. Apparently, we need to do a little more work on that. She is doing better sharing at school but her toys at home... She had a look like, ah, maybe you don't know it, but that's MY toy. Especially the Top she got from Grandma for Christmas. Both girls wanted to play with it. And they both took turns grabbing it from the other. Katherine again giving the look like... Hey, that's MY top. She did invoke the I'm going to put it in my mouth so you can't have it rule... (Mommy taught her this so the next time we're at the Coach store we can invoke said rule). Kyla didn't much care about the slobber rule.

Things we know we need to work on:
- Stop flipping people off
- Sharing
- Continue sign language efforts

And all I wanted to do was teach her to sign things like Mommy, Daddy, bottle, more...

Pictures for the week:
http://picasaweb.google.com/daleksza/Playing#

PS - Yes, I did give the blog a new look. I thought it needed some sprucing up! :)