Wave bye-bye to baby signs

Today, we witnessed the death of Baby Signs. Well, the beginning of the end of them, anyhow. While Solanne has a verbal vocabulary of about 35 words (and growing every day), she was still keen on learning new signs for new things (her sign vocab is upwards of 50 words, easily). But today, when Derek introduced a raccoon to her in a book and said "raccoon" while making the sign, Solanne didn't do the sign. She simply said, "waco." She was not remotely interested in the sign.

For a few weeks now, Solanne has replaced or supplemented her baby signs with words: chien, ta (cat), bye-bye, cor (encore/again), lait, car, toto (auto), to mention a few.

This, of course, is the goal of baby signs: to act as a communications bridge between pre-verbal and verbal life. And it has certainly done that and continues to do so for us everyday. And now we are moving into verbal life, which is in itself very exciting. Yet it's a milestone that is difficult to watch (perhaps all milestones are hard for me). My baby is very obviously becoming a little kid, and she so desperately wants to be a big girl, like her sister.

And this is it. Within a year, our household will be babyless. I see our friends who have, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, welcomed new little ones into their families, and I remember holding my girls when they were just born, how tiny they were, how helpless they were, how soft they were. And I wondered at their beauty and their newness and the miracle of their very existence. I breathed in their smell - the smell that only hour-old babies can have. I rubbed their downy heads with my chin as I held them on my chest. I listening in shock and confusion as they cried, not knowing what they wanted exactly. Somehow, even that was magic.

Now, they are not so tiny, but still quite small, on the human scale. I still wonder at their beauty, and I believe I always will for they are still my miracles. I appreciate the moments I can hold them for more than a nanosecond, and I breathe them in wholly and completely. I listen in absolute delight as Maïa tells me her stories and fabulations and as Solanne cries out with great exuberance at the ta she sees in the book. And I realise that these moments, too, are sheer magic.