Could it be?

I'm sorry to say that I don't have a video to accompany this post, but I had to write to share with you that Del signed her first sign last weekend when we were camping. And for those of you who know me well, you'll understand why I'm so thrilled that her first sign was. . .TREE! I was hesitant to claim "first sign!" because it just seems to early for her to be communicating in that way with us already, but both Daddy F and I saw her do it not once but twice, and we both agreed that she meant it. So there you have it: first sign at 7 months and one week of age.

Her hand-babbling conversations continue, one of which I showed on video last post, with rotating arms and hands drawing tight circles in the signing space in front of her body. What's fascinating about this new development in her signing is how different and distinct it is from that other kind of sign babble. She now will also hold her hand (or hands) up, very still, and rotate her wrist slowly, so that her palm faces out then in, out then in, out then in. She watches her hands while she does this, changing the shape of her hand slightly from an open hand to an L shape as she rotates from palm facing out to palm facing in. She seems to have turned a corner in her awareness of what sign is and how she can participate, and now watches our hands intently as we sign to her. She now waves in this manner at times, to both greet people and say goodbye, and when she shows off her new movements (not on demand, not suprisingly!), she is obviously very proud of what she's doing and aware that it's pretty dang cool, this language stuff.

Fine motor language skills are developing right along with the other motor tricks she's learning. She has started to use a pincer grasp to pick up anything and everything small that she can find (and try to eat) while almost-crawling around on the ground, and has chosen the classic index-finger point as her go-to hand shape for exploring the tactile world around her. She's begun to explore new-found objects with her eyes in addition to her mouth, and will hold a novel toy or kitchen utensil at arms length, turning in this way and that so she can check it out from all angles. Pretty neat to watch, in addition to buying me a little time to avoid disaster. For example, earlier today I came back into the living room from the bathroom to find her holding a small button and looking at it very carefully, giving me just the right amount of time to grab it from her before she decided that she also wanted to see what it tasted like. Two weeks ago she wouldn't have cared what it looked like, she would have just popped it into her mouth just like everything else she got her hands on.

I'm going to try my best to get Dels' new wrist rotation on video and post it. I'm curious if this is signifying that she is acquiring the palm orientation parameter of ASL. More about that soon. . .my next post will be a basic level crash course in the phonology of English and ASL. But now is not the time. Now is the time when I eat leftover carrot cake and finish my glass of wine before going to bed at the super-cool working-mommy time of 9:00pm. Amazing how dramatically my priorities have changed in the last, I don't know, seven and a half months or so!