Hand Signals

When Haley was small, before she spoke words at all, she used sign language.  All of her therapists used sign language with her.

The standards were yes, more and all done. 

She really never used no, not that that should be a surprise.

They tried to get her to do music and toilet too, but she rarely did.  Once she could speak she phased out the sign language. 

She occasionally uses it now, but she says the word along with it. 

I never know why she does it, it just comes out sometimes. 

Her yoga instructor tries to get her to answer yes or no using sign language.  When she does, I think Haley is just copying.  It doesn't really seem like a response to me.  She answers her, but she is still really quiet in yoga.

Haley seems to have developed her own form of sign language.

I wonder if what Haley is doing is really sign language. I have no way of knowing.  I tried to look up pictures of people doing sign language, there are some great sites that you can search a word or a phrase and they show a video of someone signing.  There was no way to reverse it. 

I was going to try to describe her hand signals to you, but finally I decided that I would have my husband take pictures of me doing them.

When she is explaining something emphatically she holds one hand over the other like this:

When she is mad and not getting her way she cups one hand in the other like this:

and pulls them apart quickly. 

If she is really mad she does it over and over again.

These days she feeds herself without any problem.  In fact she is getting better about scraping the food back to the middle of the plate so that she can scoop it up again.  We have tried to get her to push a bite on to the fork with her finger, but she won't touch her food. 

It took us a long time to get her to eat sandwiches and hamburgers on her own.  Come to think of it she will eat a taco by herself now too.  So really she has come a long way. 

Sometimes it seems she hits a road block and she wants help. 

It is those times that she holds her fork like Lord Voldemort holds his wand. 

She always directs this to me.

 It kind of gives me the creeps.