Oma is for grandma

This is one of those cheerful and proud moments in the life of often helpless parents, who try to make sense of the way their children (and in particular babys) behave. Often these little people that can’t express themselves and yet have so much that they want to tell you can only resort to crying and squeeling when it all gets too much for them.

Our little E has gained another way of letting us know what’s bothering her: she started signing. In a previous post on this I wrote how we taught our first daughter to sign and that it’s been an incredibly worthwhile thing to do (there are some links to more information in the post too, if you’re interested). But that it actually ‘works’ is something that I can never quite get my head around until they’re doing it. So when I started realising that E was using her hand consistenly in exactly the same way to signal when she wants a drink I was just blown away.

Now we can start to teach her a new word and expand her signing vocabulary a little, to make our life with a baby dying to express herselve a little easier still.

Whoever came up with the idea of teaching babys to sign must have been an incredibly smart person, who I’m forever thankful to.

E’s sitting!!! All by herself!! Hurray for E!

I’m very excited! Being the second child she only receives half the attention (if not less, as M is very time consuming) and I was starting to worry about her being a little on the slow side as I’m not nurturing her the same way we did with M. But here’s the prove she’s just as clever as her big sister.

I feel like saying something really meaningful on this occasion but as I’m not very poetical mayself I’ll have to borrow a few lines here from a very nice little book:

The baby sits.

The baby sits

with a cushion there to catch her

’cause she sways and leans and wobbles a bit,

and she waves her hands at shadows

and her sunhat tips

but the baby sits.

I’m mourning the end of an era … but I suppose that usually means the start of something new, which might be just as exciting (if not better), but right now I’m feeling grouchy!

Ever since the birth of our first daughter my husband has been making a huge effort to make German our ‘home language’. That ment that both of us were only ever speaking German with her, though we mostly spoke English with each other.

We had read about common approaches to bilingual childrearing and knew that the “One-parent-one-language” approach would have best suited our situation (I’m a native German speaker and my husband is a native English speaker). Though, knowing how strong the influence of English is, especially when all friends and relatives our daughter has regular contact with are English-speaking, we wanted to provide as much reinforcement for the German language as possible. Also, my husband was feeling a little selfish and thought that speaking German with our daughter would mean he had plenty of opportunity to practise his German and improve.

His German certainly has improved dramatically since the birth of our daughter, but never having taken any formal German classes or lived in Germany, now our daughter is overtaking him. She’s starting to prompt him, when he’s struggeling to find the right words and instructions are sometimes so unclear that even I can’t exactly make out what’s required of her (sorry, darling!).

So, as of yesterday my husband is speaking Enlish with our daughters. M seems quite excited about the whole thing and is already speaking mostly English with him, except when she runs out of words in English she’ll default to German (E isn’t exactly aware of what’s going on). I’m somewhat glad that my husband can express himself a lot more freely now, but can’t help feeling slightly vulnerable about it.

I’m it, now! I’m on my own!

I guess only time will tell how this new era in our family life is going to work out.

Our little E has started solids and we’re entering the jungle of baby emotions. As she starts squeeling and pulling faces the helpless parents wonder:
“Is she full?”

“Does she want some more?”

“Would she maybe like a drink?”

“How do I know?”

I remember that this was the time that we started to teach our first daughter sign language or baby sign.

Believing the common myth that bilingual children are late talkers, we thought that sign language might be a good way for her to communicate with us until she was able to speak (not realising that we were effectively introducing her to a third language, there we were raising a trilingual child without knowing it).

We had seen friends of our sign with their children and had also read about it in the Baby Wise book and it somehow made a lot of sense to us: Children are able to use their hands quite well long before they can make themselves understood verbally.

We started to teach M the sign for finished and would use it at the end of bath time, meal time or any other activity. From 6 months on we would show her as we said the word and then use her arms and make her sign the word. By about 8 months she started to try and sign as well and by about 9 months I could recognise well, when she tried to say ‘finished’.

And it sure saved us a lot of frustration. When other babies were starting to complain and cry at the end of a long shopping trip our little M would sit and frantically sign ‘FINISHED!!!!!!’ again and again until we got it. We had a base to communicate on with her, she could let us know what was bothering her (that she’d actually had enough of something) and we were able to deal with that.

Once she’d mastered that one sign we later introduced others, like “drink” and “more”. Though we never kept it up and once she was able to talk encouraged her to talk, as we wanted to focus on the already existent languages in our family, it has been a great help to us.

I will now have to brush up on my skills so that we can teach E as well.