More On Signing

Our Deaf Mentor continues to be a huge help in improving communication with Whitney. Our weekly lessons help Melanie and I to learn the language. Then we're able to model it and teach it to Whit and Liam.

At this point we've lost count of Whitney's total signing vocabulary and it's also similar for Liam. Both sign for the things they need very proficiently.

Whitney still lacks quite a bit of hand dexterity to be able to sign some of the more intricate words. She's not alone in this however. If you've ever seen me try to finger spell words that have more than three letters, you'd know my dexterity isn't the greatest either.

We're working on some games that will help her to open and close her hands. Hopefully that will help her loosen up a bit more. We have to do exercises with her hands in the guise of a game because she's still very sensitive to having her hands touched and held.

On thing that intrigues me about my kids is that they are starting to interact with each other a lot more. They do things to make each other laugh at the dinner table and sometimes even share toys. Amazing, I know. But I've never once seen them sign to one another when they're on their own. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe they think sign is just a way to communicate with grown ups. Who knows. But it's something I'll be watching curiously. Sign will be the language that these two siblings need to use to talk to one another. So I'm hoping they'll start signing to each other soon.