Uma! Milk!

Joey made the sign for milk today.  I’ve been showing him how to sign for things for a week or so now, since he has become so demanding of specific things.  He can’t tell me what he wants yet, and he has fallen back on that old baby crutch of screaming for everything.  I would like some Cheerios is: SCREECH!  I am thirsty and I’d love a cup of milk: SCREEEECH!  I need the remote to change the channel so we can watch war movies like at Grampie’s house: SCAAAAARRRREEECH!

I spend my days trying to decipher screams and maybe I’m a bad mom because I’m not in tune with the subtle nuances between a “give me milk” scream and an “I see a kitty on the floor” scream, but I feel like I’m trapped in a twisted game of scream charades every day, holding things up and trying to guess what it is that will solve the puzzle and make the screaming stop because sometimes it escalates until I can feel my hair vibrating on my head and I can't take it anymore.

When Joey was a few weeks old, I saw something on TV about Baby Signs and how they're really good for easing the frustration between not-yet verbal children and their parents.  Since my knowledge of signs is pretty limited to the ones I use on the road to tell other drivers how I feel about them, I had to do some research.  I went to the American Sign Language web site and started learning signs.  I was so excited about the prospect of being able to communicate with my tiny infant that I started right away, doing signs for everything right up in his face so he would understand.   Turns out, three months is far too early to start with signs, and my son, not even able to sit up on his own yet, just stared at me like why is this one always with the hands in my face? 

My enthusiasm for signing lasted about two weeks, and when I saw that Joey just wasn’t getting it, I gave it up and stopped.  Since then he has learned so many things.  He learned how to roll over, how to crawl, how to stand and then how to walk.  He even says words like duck and baby and Mama, though in the last couple of weeks, “Mama” has somehow become Uma and so I guess that is who I am to him now.  Uma.  But all of those things are the things that eventually every baby does.  It’s hardwired in.  But when he did the sign for milk, such a specific hand movement that he wouldn’t have come up with on his own, I knew for sure that I actually taught him something.

I almost knocked him out of his high chair I was so excited when I saw his hand curl up in the milk sign and he looked at his sippy cup on the counter, full of milk.  And it was extra exciting because my mother-in-law was here to see it, so I have proof this time.  When he first started saying mama, he would only do it when we were alone.  I tried everything to get him to say it in front of other people and he would just sit there, lips sealed, smiling at me like, I don’t know who you are or what you’re called, but you seem like a nice enough lady.  Then when we were alone again, with no one around to hear, it would be nonstop MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMA!  I felt like Big Bird when no one believed him that Snuffy was real.  My mom even told me that maybe I was mistaken, and maybe I just thought I heard him say mama because everyone knows that daddy is always a baby’s first word.

Next I’m going to work on Eat and Kitty and Water.  It would also be useful if I could figure out a baby sign for STOP CHEWING THE CHRISTMAS TREE and WE DON'T PLAY IN THE TOILET because I'm starting to feel like the word NO has become 50% of my daily vocabulary.  I'm also going to work on cleaning up my language before he starts learning other kinds of things from me.  The wrong things.

Comments

[sherry]

I remeber how excited I was the first time Hayley started doing the milk sign. I did it to Breanna a couple of weeks ago and then I realized she was only two weeks old and maybe signs could wait awhile.