I’m Lisa, mum to Max (4 years) and Emma (2 years). I started to sign with Max when he was 8 months old and he did his first meaningful sign ‘milk’ just a few weeks later. This was shortly followed by ‘food/eat’ and ‘drink’ – Max loves his food! At just 10 months Max was able to use his signs to tell me that he’d had enough of his dinner, but would really like some pudding from the snack cupboard please!

By 13 months old Max had a signing vocabulary of around 40 signs, and completely grasped the concept of using signs to communicate. So much so that if he didn’t know the sign and wanted to say something, he’d just make one up. And when he signed ‘I love you’ at just 14 months, my heart melted……

Now that Max is talking he stills uses his signs to make himself clear if I can’t understand what he’s saying, or for emphasis if he doesn’t think I’m listening! Max is also now busy teaching his baby sister to sign. We’ve signed with Emma since birth, and she made her first sign ‘milk’ at just 5 months! Aged 18 months she had a signing vocabulary of over 60 signs and her speech has developed at a spectacular rate too.

I want to share the joys of baby signing with other parents and so I run my own TinyTalk baby signing classes. I hope you’ll enjoy signing with your own baby as much as I do with Max and Emma.