Using ASL

Welcome back to Taylor Talks!

​To be perfectly honest, I totally forgot about the "only signing" thing that we were supposed to be doing this morning. In my defense, however, I wasn't exactly out and about in the morning hours. My parents let me sleep in, and even after I had gotten up and walked my dog, I went right back into my room and lounged on my bed as I played games on my tablet. Maybe not the best defense in the world, as this clearly means that I was incredibly lazy today, but I obviously couldn't sign to my siblings if I wasn't even in the same room as them!

Alright, so I wasn't the most productive person today, but after two weeks of going non-stop every day, with early mornings and late nights, I kind of think that I deserved a day to lay around in my pajamas. Hey, this whole "adult" thing is more difficult than I imagined it would be! I'm not used to this whole routine of being productive every day, even though I probably should be used to it by now. I still miss the good ole college days, when I could sleep in until the last possible second before I needed to throw on clothes and run to class, and take a nap in the middle of the afternoon if I wanted to do so... I don't think I really appreciated the life I was living at the time.

Anyway, back to today... I may not have started out the morning just signing to my siblings, but I did use ASL frequently throughout the day. Between my mom and I (and yes, she did remember more often than I did), we signed the majority of what we said to the twins all day, and sometimes signed without speaking to see if they could figure it out. The girls did pretty well! I know that we're still at the very beginning of this journey, but at least the girls are interested and remembering some of the signs that we're teaching them. They both sign "Good Night" to us at bedtime, and they know how to say "Mom" and "Dad" without any help (there's too many of us for them to remember how to sign the rest of our names just yet).

The girls are both very receptive to learning new signs and repeating back what we show them. Whenever they asked for something throughout the day, we tried to have them ask us in ASL before we would answer them. For instance, when they wanted snacks before bed tonight, my mom showed them how to say, "I'm hungry," and "Can I have an ice pop?" The girls repeated the signs back to us beautifully, and then they were thrilled when I got up to get them ice pops as they had asked! It's so cute to see the smiles that come over their faces when they're proud of themselves.

My other sister has been signing a bit with the girls as well, since she took her first ASL class this year at school. My dad and brother don't really know any sign, but I'm hoping that they'll get on board and start learning. I really want to have a formal class to teach everyone some of the basics, but we can't seem to get everyone in the same room at the same time to focus on learning. Hopefully we'll be able to do it soon. In the meantime, we'll keep incorporating more ASL into our daily lives and it should just become habit for the girls to use it throughout life. I'm glad that they're starting to learn at such a young age, because it's definitely more difficult to pick up another language later in life. I wish that I had been able to learn more when I was younger, because then I would be much further along in my own learning process.

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Thanks!
Taylor

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