Signing and counting birdies

Greta is working on signing words to us. We're getting her in to a Baby Signs class next month, but we've been showing her the basics - eat, please, more, all done, nurse, kitty cat - for a few months now.

Every once in a while she'll sort of sign "more" to us, but for the most part, she seems to understand the signs more than she'll generate them to actually communicate with us. For example, if she's getting fussy and I sign "nurse" to her, she'll calm down because she knows what's coming.

But in the past week or so, she's developed her own sign! For birds, of all things.

I don't know why she chose "bird" to be her first real sign, but any time we're outside and she sees or hears birds, she does the same thing. It's not the "true" sign for bird, but because it's the same consistent sign and she only does it for birds, it counts. So, when she sees or hears birds, she looks around for them, waves her arm over her heard and goes "ffft" with her mouth.

It's very, very cute, I promise.

And with all the talk of birdies in our house lately, I was reminded of this awesome set of pictures of Fin. So I'm throwing in another Fin story from the mom-memory archives!

A while back (okay, it was February of this year, so Fin was 2yrs, 2 months old here) Fin and GaGa were having lunch at her house. They were talking about all the things they saw out the window and several birds were hanging out on the fence.




Fin was learning to count at that time, so they counted the three birds hanging out there.



Then, as birds will, they flew away.

Fin shouted out, "Come back birdies!" and one did! The look on his face was priceless.

I was so glad I was there with a camera to capture the pure joy and surprise on his face when that bird came back.