“Daddy, what old is Bear?”
“Do you mean how old is Bear?”
“How old is Bear, yes.”
“I don’t know, sweetie. How old do you think he is?”
“Sixty two.”
“Sixty two?”
“One.”
“Oh, he’s sixty one, not sixty two?”
“No. Bear is sixty two one.”
“Sixty two one.”
“Right.”
Honestly, the most impressive thing is that she knows any numbers above fiveteen.
Carolyn’s been eating a lot of ice cream and watching a lot of videos the past few days, and we’re sort of concerned that she’s going to get entirely too used to both.
This is all happening because on Thursday, she had her tonsils and adenoids surgically removed. I imagine that it’s never easy for a parent to have a child go into an operating room, but it seems like there’s something extra difficult when it’s a little girl who’s not yet three. I know that much younger children go into operating rooms every day; my sister underwent her first operation at the age of six months. As I grew up, visiting hospitals became a regular feature of my life, and I have little fear of hospitals or doctors to this day. Needles, yes. Those terrify me. But not hospitals.
It’s just as well, because last Tuesday, I ended up in the emergency room with a broken big toe. This was the result of an unfortunate interaction between my foot and the island in our kitchen, and at first I didn’t even think it was serious. There wasn’t much pain, no swelling or discoloration, and I could still move my toe just fine. One of the lessons I learned as a child is, “If you can move it, then it must not be broken”. Turns out that’s wildly incorrect. It’s entirely possible to move a broken appendage and not even have it hurt that much. At first. Eventually, though, the toe stiffens up and it starts to hurt like there’s no tomorrow.
So I went on crutches two days before my daughter went in for surgery, less than a week after Kat came off crutches, which she’d been issued after breaking an ankle a few weeks back. She’s still wearing an Aircast most of the time. It’s been a laugh a minute in our house, let me tell you. (Though I must admit I’m jealous of her Aircast. It totally looks like a jet-boot from Star Trek, right down to having what look like little reaction boosters on the back.)
So now Kat and I are hobbling around, whereas Carolyn is just about back to normal. In fact, she was running around laughing, singing, and playing pool within a few hours of the surgery. We figured we’d have to go back to signing with her while her throat healed, but nope, no need. The original plan was to keep her in the hospital overnight for observation, but about six hours after surgery, the doctor told us to go home. They’d never seen anything like it, they said, and especially not in a child so young. Sometimes I think she just might be a superhero-in-waiting, kind of like the invincible teenager on Heroes, most of which I watched on the emergency room’s TV while waiting to have my foot examined.
I suppose most every parent thinks their kid is super, but seriously, she’s an ironclad trooper. In a weird way, I’m inordinately proud of her, which is kind of like being proud of her for having brown hair, but there it is anyway. I fervently hope she rebounds just as powerfully and positively from all life’s injuries.
Anyway, given that she’s technically in recovery and we’d already planned for cold soft foods and lots of videos, we just went with the plan. Now we’re all caught up on recent episodes of The Backyardigans and have been through most of her Signing Time videos (her choice!), and are starting to think about how to wean her back to one show every third day or so. We’re currently hoping that going back to pre-school does the trick. Wish us luck.
After a lovely Sunday morning breakfast at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, Kat, Carolyn, and I strolled through The Grove to check the sights and pick up a gift card for some friends. As we neared the center of the main drag, Carolyn suddenly pointed and shrieked delightedly, “Daddy!”
She was pointing directly at the large white logo in the middle of the silver façade of the Apple Store.
I’m thinking that maybe I need to spend a little less time on my PowerBook.
Back in January, I wrote about teaching Carolyn sign language, and enough time has passed and things changed that it seems like a good time to revisit the topic. (Also, our friend Gini wrote about it, and that spurred me into typing.)
As I mentioned back in January, we started out with Baby Signs but moved on to American Sign Language (ASL). This has held true, and when the next child comes into our lives, we’ll use only ASL signs. To me, the real value of Baby Signs is in showing you where to start: with needs like food, water, milk, and so on. In moving to ASL, we’ve been immensely helped by the Signing Time video series, which Carolyn loves. She watches one every other day or so, which is about as much TV as we let her watch, and she can identify each one with a different sign.
At the time I last wrote about it, Carolyn was using about thirty signs. She’s now somewhere past two hundred signs—I don’t know the exact number, as Kat and I lost track a while ago. This includes all the primary colors, emotional states, and much more. She’s also started to speak, with about twenty or so verbal words. It gets really fascinating when she combines them.
For example, she’s started asking me if I’m done working whenever I come downstairs from my office. She does this by saying “Daddy?” while signing “work” and then “done”. If I confirm that I’m done working for the day (or at least for the moment), she’ll do it all over again, except this time saying “Daddy” in a satisfied tone of voice instead of as a question. Then we spend some time playing.
In fact, one of these exchanges led to Carolyn telling me what she wanted to do when she grows up. After confirming that Daddy was done working for the day, she thought a minute, then signed “work” and emphatically pointed to herself.
“You want to work?” I asked, a little bit surprised. She nodded and said “yeah!” (one of her favorite spoken words).
“Okay”, said I, amused, “what do you want to do when you work?”
She thought a moment more and then signed “airplane”. My mouth dropped open.
“You want to be a pilot?” I asked.
She said “yeah!” again, quite enthusiastically, and then ran off to kick a ball across the yard.
Now, it’s possible that Carolyn was saying that she wants to do whatever Daddy does, because when he leaves for a few days, he’s left on a plane. But my gut feeling was that she was saying she wanted to work on or with airplanes. Attendant, sure; engineer, why not?; but pilot was the first thing that came to mind.
Then again, about a week later, she told us she wanted to work on swings and slides. So I guess she’s still evaluating her options.
She also can identify different bedtime stories through signs and speech. “The Bear’s Water Picnic” is represented by the sign for “water”; “Goodnight Moon” by the sign for “moon”; “Pete the Sheep” by the spoken word “baa”; and so on. Although she usually picks the same set of stories each night, she can clearly tell us when she wants something different.
For months now, Carolyn’s been able to distinguish between being hurt and being scared when she falls down. As we hold her, we just ask her if the fall hurt or scared her, and she tells us. That alone would have made the whole effort worthwhile, because she has told us what the problem is, and so we know how best to comfort her. It also seems to calm her down simply to tell us, the same way it can make an adult feel better just to say out loud what is upsetting them.
She can also tell us when we’re being silly, when she’s surprised, and more. When a baby near her cries, she always looks concerned. We can tell her that the baby is sad, or grumpy, or hungry, and she can sign back the emotion to indicate she understands.
So has signing delayed her speech? There’s no way to know. Her speaking vocabulary is on track, according to our pediatrician: some kids do speak early, but to have three spoken words at 18 months is normal, and she was at five. Plus over 100 signs, which has caused our pediatrician to consider her bilingual. According to the father of a deaf child with whom I recently conversed, most independent studies show that signing has no major impact, positive or negative, on speech development, at least across the whole study group.
Regardless of whether or not the signing has slowed or sped Carolyn’s development of speech, it has quite definitely accelerated her ability to communicate. That, to me, was the whole reason to use signs. For a year now, she’s been able to communicate her needs and wants, and for at least half a year she’s been able to converse with us in some fairly complex ways.
Perhaps as a result of this, Carolyn is entirely capable of following multistep directions, like: “Please go pick up the stuffed cow and put it where it belongs, then come back to Mommy”. If she’s nervous about a person or situation, we can find out what’s bothering her and show her that it’s okay; conversely, we can tell her when something is dangerous when it might not appear to be, like a hot plate, and get confirmation that she understands. We’ve been able to teach her to sign “please”, “thank you”, and “excuse me”, and she understands when each is appropriate, sometimes saying them without prompting. We can get her to calm down for a not-desired nap by asking what she wants to do instead of napping, and then telling her she can do it later, after she takes the nap. In other words, she’ll agree to delay gratification, so long as we assure her that she’ll get what she wants after doing something that we want her to do.
Remember that she’s not yet two years old.
While Kat and I sometimes augment our words with signs, most of the time we just talk to Carolyn, and she responds with whatever combination of words and signs is needed. So she has all kinds of exposure to speech, and her development in that regard seems fairly normal. It could be that she’d have spoken earlier without the signs, but then again it could be that she’d have spoken later. Maybe the signs have reduced the incentive to speak because she can get by without speech, or maybe the signs have shown her how powerful communication is and thus increased the incentive to speak.
We have no way to know, now or ever. All that I know is that she has been communicating with us for many, many months more than she would have otherwise, and that she’s almost certainly a much happier and better-adjusted child as a result.
Back in May, I said that “…if you’re a new parent or a parent-to-be, I strongly recommend that you try this with your own baby”. Take that sentiment and increase it by an order of magnitude. I truly believe it’s one of the best parenting decisions we ever made.
The last 36 hours have been filled with extremes.
In the wee hours of the morning yesterday, after many weeks of work and rework and extra work, A List Apart was launched in its new incarnation. The community reaction was very strongly positive, with the strongest initial complaints being the lack of DNS switchover and the missing print style sheet. There were other criticisms, of course, but nothing that I honestly didn’t expect from the outset. Taken as a whole, the feedback was so much better than I’d hoped it would be.
Mid-afternoon that same day, I listened to voice mail from a recent client informing me that, due to a catastrophic misunderstanding, I’d be paid what they had understood the fees to be, and not what I had told them the fees would be. This would mean the paycheck would be smaller than expected. Like six or seven thousand dollars smaller.
(And don’t bother to tell me that I should have gotten it all in writing beforehand: I know that, okay? Now I’ve really learned it, and double-hard. Leave me in my misery and idiocy, and learn from my mistake. That would at least confer some small bit of good.)
In the early evening, Carolyn picked up one of her letter-blocks and said enthusiastically “beee!” as she held it up toward me and used her other hand to sign “B”. The block she held was a block with the letter B on it. I put it in a group with a bunch of others and asked her to show me the B. She did. She did it twice more. Then she did it for the letter E. I was astonished, stunned, inexpressably proud. It isn’t reading, but it’s a recognition of letter forms, and that’s where it all starts.
At Carolyn’s bed time, as I was searching for a book to read to her, I came across my copy of “Are You My Mother?”. This is the book with which I taught myself to read. It had gone missing three or four years ago, and I had searched through all our children’s books three times to try to find it. My mother died thinking she’d accidentally given it away, or packed it into the wrong box during one of her spates of house cleaning.
It sat on the shelf as if it had never been anywhere else, and I was almost afraid to touch it, for fear it was an illusion. The superstitious core of my soul wondered if Mom’s spirit had found the book and returned it to me. A pivotal touchstone of my childhood, long absent and once mourned and inexplicably restored. I couldn’t choose between elation, gratitude, and grief.
This morning, as I spun records on what could be the second-to-last radio show I ever do, Kat called to tell me that one of her best friends had disappeared, along with her money and passport, while on vacation. From all indications, it is a purposeful disappearance, but not much less worrisome for being so.
Sometimes, I think it would be nice if life’s rich pageantry could tone things down just a shade or two.
Last fall, Tantek and I presented a poster at HT04. To get it to the conference in one piece and to avoid having to lug it across the country, I created a PDF of the poster and sent it off to the Kinko’s web site. It was printed for me by the Kinko’s closest to the conference. All I had to do was send them a digital file, and 2,150 miles later I retrieved the physical output.
As I did so, I thought: This is really amazing. This is what’s so great about being connected.
A few months later, Kat upgraded her car, and the new one came with XM digital radio. We started receiving music from geosynchronous orbit, a digital signal broadcast from 22,600 miles above the equator and deciphered by the short, stubby antenna on the car’s roof. On a drive to visit relatives, we listened to the same station for the entire four-hour drive there, and again for the return drive.
As we did so, I thought: This is incredible. This is a great example of the benefits of connecting everything.
I was wrong in both cases.
This morning, I stood in a hotel room in Chiba, Japan and saw my wife and daughter on the television. Back home in Cleveland, they saw me on a computer monitor. We talked to each other, waved hello, got caught up on recent events. I watched as Carolyn ran around my office, heard her say “mama”, and agreed with her when she signed “telephone” while she watched my image. I stuck my tongue out to make a silly face, and six thousand miles away, my daughter laughed with delight at my antics.
A few minutes after we’d finished the chat, with the glow of home and family still warm upon me, I thought: This is why we connected everything in the first place.
This morning, Carolyn told me quite clearly that she wanted some yogurt for breakfast. Technically, what she said was “more baby”, but I knew what she meant.
How did a 13-month-old manage to tell me what she wanted? By using sign language. Kat and I have been teaching her Baby Signs, which is a simplified version of American Sign Language. I’m given to understand that Baby Signs figure in the plot of the recent movie Meet The Fockers, but don’t let that sour you on the idea. The amazing thing is that it really does work, if you’re willing to put in time and effort.
At this point, we’re actually looking more to real ASL signs than we are to the Baby Signs vocabulary when teaching Carolyn new signs. I think the real utility of Baby Signs is that it gets you started where it makes the most sense: teach your baby signs like “food”, “water”, “more”, and “all done”. This allows the child to communicate their wants and needs long before they ever become verbal. It works because motor skills advance more quickly than verbal skills do. I’ll be very interested to see if Carolyn retains the signing as she grows up, or if she’s able to pick up secondary languages more easily.
Carolyn’s first sign was “hat”, which of course didn’t help at all with deducing her needs, but it was still incredible to witness. I was actually there when she figured it out. She was looking through a Baby Signs board book while I stood watching. She stared very intently at a picture of a baby signing “hat”, and then put her hand to the side of her head, just like in the picture. My jaw dropped, but I managed to keep quiet. She did it a couple more times, then looked up at me. That’s when I showered the praise. It only took a day or two to teach her that the actual sign for “hat” is to pat the hand on the head, not just place it there, like she saw in the picture. Now Carolyn signs “hat” whenever she sees a picture of one of her grandfathers, because they both wear hats all the time.
Her signing vocabulary is now about thirty words, and she’s actually devised two signs of her own—which means, unfortunately, that we have no idea what she’s trying to say when she makes them! But we’ll figure it out eventually.
As for how “more baby” means “I want yogurt”, that’s because we quickly noticed that when Carolyn signs “more” what she really means is “I want”. As for “baby”, the yogurt we feed her has a picture of a baby on each container. One day she walked over to the refrigerator, patted the door, and signed “baby”. Then she had to do it a few more times while the rest of us scratched our heads and said things like, “The refrigerator’s not a baby, sweetie. What are you trying to say?” before finally figuring it out.
Sometimes I think she’s smarter than we are.
So if you’re a new parent or a parent-to-be, I strongly recommend that you try this with your own baby. When a baby starts waving bye-bye, that’s when they’re ready to start learning sign language. (We started earlier than that, hoping to lay a foundation, and may or may not have been wasting our time.) It will help reduce frustration, and therefore tantrums, because you’ll be better able to meet their needs when they have them. The system isn’t perfect, of course: any baby that gets too upset will be unable to communicate with anything besides tears. It’s still a great thing when your toddler comes into the room and signs “food” long before the hunger starts making her cranky.
I wonder if the children of deaf parents, whether they themselves are deaf or not, have long benefitted (tempramentally and intellectually) from signing, and nobody outside the deaf culture bothered to notice.
Last night we went out for dinner with some of the other kids in Carolyn’s playgroup (and their parents) at default favorite Matsu. Carolyn, as usual, had miso soup with extra tofu cubes and nori, some steamed sticky rice, and half a harumaki. All very much as normal. But then, as Kat started on her Manhattan roll with citrus tobiko, Carolyn grabbed a piece and stuffed it into her mouth.
Her first sushi—I was so proud. We know she liked it, too, because after demolishing the first piece, she grabbed another one and ate most of the contents.
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(And did I have the camera with me? Of course not. One of the other daddies had a camera phone, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this entry with a picture.)