My son has never been a good napper so he goes until he crashes.  Just before dinner he fell asleep and we couldn’t wake him up.

We still couldn’t wake him up.

I love that boy!

My poor kids, they end up getting all sorts of experimental haircuts from me.   I just can’t bring myself to pay money for haircuts.  My aunt is a hair stylist and she taught me how to cut my husbands hair when we first got married.  I’ve pretty much mastered his haircut, but now I’m teaching myself how to do my kids.  Annie’s hair isn’t too bad, but poor Brandon.  Today I tried to use the buzzer, or clippers what ever you call them.  I thought I had the same length that I used last time, but apparently I was wrong.  His hair got sooo short.  I had to keep going though, otherwise it would be completely uneven.  The poor boy looks like he’s in the military.  Good thing he’s only two and he could care less.  Hopefully it looks better in a month or so, I just don’t want to tell anyone that I did it!

Andrea Burton Ploehn, www.signing4baby.com

Brandon love peanut butter and honey sandwiches but he’s never been able to say it.  Here’s his attempt.

Brandon cracks me up.  I laugh at my son everyday, I think he’s one of the funniest people I know.  I’m going to start putting more videos of him on so that you can enjoy him like I do.

Sign language has helped me understand Brandon a lot more.  He talks a lot, but sometimes he’s a little hard to understand.  When he first started talking if I couldn’t understand what he was saying, I would just ask him to sign it to me.  He was a lot less frustrated because I could actually understand what he was trying to say since he knew how to sign it to me.  Sign language helps different kids in different ways, but from personal experience it has definitely helped both of my kids in the areas they needed most.

Andrea Ploehn, co-founder www.signing4baby.com

Here’s Annie and Brandon with the van ghost.

Here are my beautiful older children teaching my 11 week old sign language. It’s so fun to get the whole family involved.

Andrea Burton Ploehn

As a family we like to play games. We were playing hide and seek one night and Brandon started signing “where, I don’t know”. He kept looking for Annie but he just couldn’t figure it out. He did this when he was about 13 months old. Not many children can say full sentences like, “Where is Annie, I don’t know where she’s hiding”. With sign language though, he was able to communicate this exact thought.

When we can give our hearing babies the advantage of both ASL and English the benefits are fantastic. In her book Dancing with Words, Marylin Daniels explains that “Sign language has the unique capacity to tap into the natural exchange between hand and brain, optimizing the emergence of language in the child because of the physiological advantage of American Sign Language (ASL) over English.”

Games are a great time to reinforce signing. Your child is already doing something that they enjoy and when you add a sign to that environment then they automatically associate enjoyment with the signs.