First you have to teach a child to talk.
March 8th, 2007 by Jim Clark
Then you have to teach it to be quiet.
Our kids are talking a lot these days. A lot of their speech is combined with sign language that we began teaching them when they were newborns, and now at almost 19 months they’re picking it up like crazy. They’ve been talking for a while now in single-word statements, but lately their vocabulary has really gathered momentum. We’ve been writing down things as they say them, and so far they know over 50 words and signs. I have to give a lot of credit to the signing — it really gave them an early aptitude for language that I believe they might not have had otherwise.
Tonight we witnessed a bit of a milestone. I was giving the kids their bath and towards the end they were starting to look like prunes but didn’t want to get out of the tub. I told them I was going to drain the tub and when the water was all gone they’d have to get out. They watched the water disappear down the drain, but then when it was finally gone they both got upset.
My daughter looked up at me. “Waa?” she asked and made the sign for ‘water‘.
“Water all done,” I said, making the signs for ‘water‘ and ‘all done‘.
Then she held out her hands with the palms up while shrugging her shoulders and asked “where waa all done?” She made the signs back at me, looking very upset that the water had all disappeared.
“The water is all done, sweetheart,” I said. “It went down the drain, down to the ocean. It went bye-bye like when Daddy takes out the garbage.”
She looked into the empty tub, staring at the drain almost wistfully. “Waa all done down garbage,” she said. “Bye bye.”
Then it hit me — My daughter just made a sentence! I’m having my first real conversation with her!
She spent the next 20 minutes in complete turmoil over the fact that waa was all done and had gone down garbage. We had to repeatedly reassure her that it had gone to a better place and would come back to visit some day.
