Julia is enjoying a world that she can communicate with. She has mastered a squeal and babble to get our attention. She points with her finger to what she wants or where she wants to go to. Her little arm is extended straight with a lot of excitement when she is pointing. She still has her wild arm wave of excitement when she sees us with something she wants, generally food. The last couple of days have brought the sign language sign ‘More’ when she is interested in eating or wanting more food. Recently, she started raising her arms to be picked up, and occasionally she is saying ‘UP’ at the same time.

I wonder what she will start doing tomorrow. We are seeing new things everyday!

Thanks to one of our friends and a Baby Einstein video, we have encouraged Emily to communicate with us via sign language. She has adopted some signs into her daily communication. The signs that she has used most are ‘Daddy’ (Granddaddy), ‘more’, ‘please’, and ‘eat’. If you ask her to sign ‘kiss’ and ‘baby’ she will, but they are not words that she uses on her own.

Examples of how she uses signs:

• Yesterday at the store she handed me the baby food container out of the shopping cart and signed ‘eat’. Instead of opening the baby food container we headed over to the deli section and got some free samples of bread to get a snack.
• While eating food Emily will sign ‘please’ or ‘more’ and sometimes both to ask for more food. The other day she was signing ‘please’ and I tried to get her to sign ‘more’ and ‘please’. Instead of imitating me she nodded her head up and down with much excitement. It was like she was agreeing with me that she wanted more.