from november

Here are a few photos (and semi-successes) from November that I never posted...

Mosquitoes were still rampant, so I rigged up a king-size mosquito net (thrift store find, brand new for $6, yay!) so Josephine could spend some time outside. It has worked okay. It's really too time consuming to set up, and in between times, a tacky strand of twine swings through the back yard from a high branch. Need to figure out a better method.

Below is a picture of her being very tired of her floor time and my photos, and doing her "all done" sign. Basically, any focused hand movement (usually involving a closing of the fingers) was her "all done" sign. I believe the cognition went something like this:

When they ask me if I'm all done eating, they move their hands back and forth. And when we decide I am indeed finished, they move their hands back and forth while they talk about how "all done" I am. Therefore, being all done has something to do with moving my hands. So when I've had enough, I'm going to move my hands. YES! That's it!!

So in that sense, she caught on to it pretty fast. And since we have her keep her hands in her lap when we feed her, when she pulls them out and intentionally opens and closes her fist, (usually accompanied by an irritated loud noise, which every now and then sounds an imaginative hair like "all done"), that tends to be her "all done" sign. She also started using it for other situations, even though we hadn't been-- like when she wants to be put down (she's "all done" with being held), or when she is tired of sitting in her room and wants to be played with, when she's been in her car seat beyond her desired amount of time, etc. I found this all very humorous-- it was funny for her to express herself so deliberately. Made her seem less like a baby and more like a little person with opinions.

So of course, thinking that this baby sign language stuff was brilliant, I started showing her "more" and "banana" and "mom" and "dad" and "please" and "thank you" and waving hi-- none of which we'd been doing previously. BOY was that a mistake! It was like you could see the complete synapse-sizzling meltdown in her brain every time she tried to communicate something. She got all the signs confused (to the extent that she even had the dexterity to imitate them) and it frustrated both her and us. It also killed the consistency of her "all done" sign because she was mixing up movements and getting mad that we couldn't read her mind.

So, other than waving hi, we went back to just doing "all done." It's currently January, and while she has waving hello down, we haven't progressed past her initial abilities with signing, (still just her version of "all done") so it's not really any more helpful than her other cues, (glamorous things like arching her back and throwing her head over in total drama, shrieking, etc.) So I think it might fall more in the body language category than sign language, for now.

And of course, who can't resist a few naked baby shots? (Don't worry, I remained on close mosquito watch the entire time.)