Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Please Pass the Chocolate!

Before Dear Son was even born, I had decided that I was going to teach him to sign. I taught Dear Daughter a few signs when she was about 12 months old, but they never stuck, and ultimately they were never needed as she began talking in two word sentences by 18 months of age and has always been so verbally advanced that she could communicate quite well with her words.

When Son was five months old I picked a couple signs and began doing them frequently for him. I did everything the books and literature recommend. He never was real consistent with "milk", but for some reason he picked up on "bath" pretty quickly and now signs it consistently when we ask him if he's ready for his bath. This is his second consistent sign. The first one was "done." The literature suggests teaching "more" as one of the first signs, but I thought it would be more constructive for a child to communicate he was done eating as our culture has plenty of problems with eating more. By about 9 or 10 months of age Son would finally wave his hands in fashion with the sign for "done" and say "Duh! Duh!" which is short for "done." After he could sign and communicate "done", I began to focus on teaching him "more." He never seemed to quite get it. At least not until last weekend.

Son LOVES chocolate; he has come by it honestly as both Dear Husband and I are chocoholics. Over the weekend I rationed out chocolate Easter eggs for the kids, and whenever I offered him one, Son would gobble it up and fuss and whine incessantly for more. I finally reminded him of the sign for "more" (thinking that it was pointless as I'd been at this for 10 months now), and to my surprise and excitement, he immediately started pressing his pudgy little fists together in front of him and saying clearly, "mo!" "mo!" I was so excited that 10 months of repetition had finally paid off. Until Husband pointed out that Son probably thinks "more" means "chocolate Easter eggs." My excitement waned as I observed for the next couple days and realized that sure enough, the only time Son signs "more" and says, "mo!" is when he wants "chocolate Easter eggs." *Sigh*

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That is too cute!

Qtpies7 said...

That is way too funny! Have you heard of the carnival of kids comedy at Life in a Shoe? This is just the kind of submission for that!