The milk joke

Baby sign language is popular for lots of reasons. Some parents do it because they think it will speed language acquisition, although the evidence for that is controversial. We did it because babies can control their hands long before they can coordinate the many muscle groups involved in speech. Frankly, it is a long 12 months before babies start talking at all, and even longer before they can be clearly understood, and waiting for Owen to be able to verbally communicate his desires would have been unnecessarily frustrating for all of us. An unexpected benefit of the handful of signs that we taught Owen is the window it's given us to his sense of humor.

Owen loves to play little games with us, and also loves to laugh. He has a hearty chuckle that tends to engulf him to the point of falling over. We're not always entirely sure what he finds so funny, but his laughter is contagious anyway. Owen's first joke, which he still loves, is what we call the "milk joke" - and no, it doesn't start with "So a baby walks into a bar..."! He often signs "milk" (squeezes his hand like he's milking a cow) while he's drinking his bottle. Once I grabbed his hand and signed milk with his tiny hand inside mine, Helen Keller/ Anne Sullivan style. He laughed and laughed. Now he does it all the time. He'll grab my hand and either stick his hand in my palm, or try to wrap his little fingers around my fist. We do the sign together and he laughs and says "milk! milk!" all while drinking and gurgling. It's the best.

Word cloud

Owen's current favorite activity is to point out anything and everything he recognizes in a book and tell us the name for it. This has led to many surprises. About half of the conversations around here these days take the form of "Did you know he says ostrich?" "No! Really? Oh, and he definitely says umbrella."

We've actually been keeping a not-very-complete list, and I've wanted a way to share it with you, but I do realize that it wouldn't make for very fascinating reading. Today, though, I got some inspiration. Here is an approximation of Owen's "word cloud":
(What is a word cloud? It's a graphic representation of words found in documents, or often websites, in which the size of the word corresponds to its frequency. From Owen's, you can see that he says, for example, "giraffe" and "sausages" quite a lot.)

Oh, and today's newest word? Coincidentally enough, in both "Where is baby's belly button?" and "Good night, Boston," Owen pointed out the "clouds" for the first time.

Imagination

I've been posting infrequently lately only because we've been extraordinarily busy. It took us a while to catch up with life after our trip to Maine - we all ended up with that nasty little bug, and it was weeks before we felt like our normal, healthy selves again. At the same time, Mike and I have both done some professional traveling, requiring some extra work beforehand, and leaving just one parental unit looking after Owen for days at a time. Those molars are still coming in, believe it or not, so Owen's sleep has been disrupted too (although we're not complaining, as we know we've been blessed with a generally good sleeper). So it's been kind of a crazy summer so far!

Owen is nearly 18 months old now, and looks more and more like a little boy, and less like a baby, every day. At roughly half my height, and pushing 30 pounds, he's quite an armful. I trimmed his bangs (his first haircut) when we returned from Maine. He's wearing toddler clothes - the sizes correspond to years, and not months, and "onesies" have given way to T-shirts. And it's not just appearances; he's also acting more like a child than a baby in many ways. He pushes toy cars around the room, saying "vroom vroom". He clearly communicates his wants, whether verbally, with his now 100-word vocabulary, or by bringing us books to read to him, or grabbing our hands and putting them on his back if he wants to be patted, or hugging our knees and saying "oooooo" if he wants to be picked up (and of course exclaiming "down! down!" a few seconds later).

Probably the most exciting new development is the apparent emergence of an imaginary world inside his head. In real life, he's constantly trying to remove glasses from people's faces, but we have to be very strict about that so that Daddy doesn't go blind. Recently, Owen found a solution to this problem. He has a book with a character who wears glasses, and he reaches out and "grabs" them carefully with his fingers, pulling the imaginary glasses off the page. He rotates them in midair, and pretends to put them on his own face. It's amazing to watch. And last week when I was away at a meeting, we did a video chat on the computer. I gave Owen a big imaginary hug, and he gave me one back, laughing and exclaiming, "Mama! Mama!"