Bed, Bath & Beyond

A little while back, I blogged about Celeste's changing bedtime rituals, well tonight she threw a new loop into things. While sitting on her changing table/dresser and getting toweled off, she demanded her blankie (which is normal), but then she spied her bookshelf.

There have been times in the past when she'd point to the shelf and ask for a book, but this time, she signed BOOK and made several other gestures that it took a minute to decode, but I think the order of things was BOOK, tapping herself (she doesn't have a formal sign for ME, but that seemed to be the semantic value of the tapping), and then PARK.

I asked if she wanted Celeste: A Day in the Park and she nodded and signed PLEASE. She's been gravitating toward that book lately, so the PARK sign made it pop into my mind pretty quickly, but the really neat thing is — and I fully admit I could be reading way too much into what's going on inside the mind of a 16 month old — 1) the tapping herself for ME (and the association of her name with the title character of the book) and 2) the stringing together of more than one sign to create a pseudosentence. (I say "pseudosentence" because there's no verb and it did take an association on my part beyond what she signed to figure out what she want, but I remain very proud of her ...)

That's both the Bed and the Beyond part of things, as for the Bath, she's been working on some good bathtime behaviors as well. First off, Celeste carries her clothes to the hamper and dumps them in for the most part by herself before getting into the tub each night. (Sometimes, she uses the trip to the hamper as an excuse to try to wander almost naked around upstairs, so it's not a perfect routine ...) And then in the bath itself, she's getting pretty good at washing herself. With prompting, she will daub her face and arms, but she really is good at scrubbing her belly, hands, and feet. (Okay, sometimes the belly scrubbing is an inch away from the belly proper, but she's still pretty good at it.) The teeth-brushing, however, remains something she needs help with.

Her other bathtub fun thing is bubble blowing. For a while there, she was putting her face to the water, but not really blowing. Now, she's happiest to point at me and at the water and, if prompted, to say bub-ba ("bubbles"). I think what she likes most is the water dripping off my beard. Of course, she can get a little overexcited and has on more than one occasion given me a good shove to push my whole face under water ...

Technoarti tags: language Baby Sign bathtime