With each child I’ve learned a little more about parenting than I knew before, I guess they refer to that as earning your stripes. Sometimes your first child gets a little more attention just by the sheer one on one interaction they are blessed with and moms often report feeling guilty when they’re just not able to do “everything” with the second baby. I had an epiphany in thinking about this topic of feelings and my experience in signing with all three of my children. What we lack in one-on-one attention with a second or third or more babies we make up for in our rooted knowledge of how to care for our children.

Amberly, my first, was at least a year before I began demonstrating the feeling signs with her. I often took note of all the “things” she was interested in as a baby since I knew that approximately 70% of baby’s first words are nouns. Then, came along Kyle. He had the luxury of seeing signs demonstrated towards him as well as towards Amberly, they’re just 17 months apart so we were still teaching Amberly lots of new signs in Kyle’s first year of life (and then it dwindled because when Kyle started walking he was into everything and I could barely keep up with just taking care of a 2 year old and a 1 year old!). There were times when I’d specifically be showing a sign to Amberly and then take a second to turn and show Kyle as well. On a side note, what was really fun is having Amberly be a little assistant teacher and reinforce the sign for Kyle!

As you might already know two year olds tend to express their feelings in a big way – both the happy and not-so-happy feelings. As they develop, these feelings are new for them and the not recognizing those feelings going on inside are part of what lead to tantrums. Knowing some of this, I would take care in showing Amberly the feelings signs as it helped to identify them for her. What I didn’t expect was that these feelings signs would be equally important to my 10 month old.

Our practice was for my husband and I to take turns each night putting one of the children to sleep. After getting pajamas on and brushing teeth, I would sign and say “I love you” to Amberly. One night as I did this, Kyle held his little hand up in the L shape, waved it back and forth and said his little version of “I love you”! I was so excited to hear and see his ability to connect this feeling with our practice of saying good night. I quickly had him turn to dad and tell him “I love you”. It was so cute. What I did next is what any excited mother would do, turned to my husband and expecting him to read my “look” and coached him to tell Kyle to say “I love you” to me. My eyes had been opened to see that even babies pick up on those feelings and understand them.

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