Mama-Come-Lately

Baby sign language is useful for those tricky pre-verbal months when the kid knows what he wants but can’t use words to tell you. Baboo has known the sign for “more” for a few months, but I only recently began teaching him “please.”

I assumed food would be the thing that got him to use “please” independently since that’s what got him going on “more.” So I’d sign “more please” before I put more grapes on his tray or broke off another bit of animal cracker for him. But he kept doing “more” without “please,” not even taking a stab at it. I’d move his hand to his chest and say “please,” say, “good baby!” and then put the food in front of him.

Sometimes, he gave me the stink-face when I did the sign for him. I began to harbor a theory that he just wasn’t interested in being polite, much as he has no interest in pasta.

This morning, he did “more please” on his own. For this:

Now, he smacked his chest with both hands — a far cry from the actual sign, which is making a circle with one hand in the middle of the chest — but I’ll still mark this as the day my kid first said, “please.”