Signing

We have been teaching Ayla sign language. Ever since we started it has been a great joy for us all. She can tell us what she wants and we don't need to guess it. It has saved frustration from all of us, and Ayla definitely seems happier ever since she learned that she can communicate with us, and knows that we can understand her, even when we can't give her what she wants immediately. Right now she is consistently doing signs for 'milk', 'food', 'water', 'more', 'book', and 'bye-bye'. She knows a few more which she occasionally does, and she is getting better at signing every day. We are teaching her sign language despite the fact that she has started talking for several reasons. First, we really started sign language even before she started talking, and this is just an extension of that. Also, she has been taking her time learning to speak, and bi-lingual children are generally expected to take longer time speaking than single language children do, and she still wasn't saying the basic 'milk' 'food' or 'drink' words which are so essential to her communicating her needs to us. Research has repeatably shown that babies who learn to sign actually learn to speak faster and have better verbal skills than babies who don't, that's probably because their mind is already wired for language by the time their motor ability and oral control are able to start speaking. Also, sign language is a great language neutral way for her to communicate with us if she gets confused between the two languages she is being taught. She has recently started a growth spur. She is eating more, and needing to breastfeed less. She is developing mentally every day, and is learning new abilities and new skills all the time. She is getting more social as well. Several times in playgroup she will hug another child. She often comes up to us or to Laika for a hug (with us, it's mostly our thighs that get the hug). She loves to hand out things. She would go through a box of toys, take them out one by one and hand it out to whoever is next to her (sometimes that could be Laika). We re-encoded the video of Ayla with the musical box and re-uploaded it, this time to youtube. The new link is available here. Hopefully you will find it to be of better quality than the previous version. We also have a new video of Ayla helping her dad clean the kitchen floor here. And now for some latest pics of Ayla:
Ayla petting Laika

Ayla playing in the living room

Ayla, after she crawled into a bowl of spinach to help her mama cook

Ayla sweeping the floor