Natalia has been starting to use new signs every couple of days. Some signs she remembers from us having shown her, other signs she makes up on her own! She was taking notice of our humidifier and making the sign for water, and then she went to try to lift it, and upon realizing that it's too heavy, she strained and made a sign that happened to correspond to the actual ASL sign for "heavy" - both hands in front, palms out, acting as if she couldn't lift them higher!
Her sign for cotton ball is the gesture of pretending to wipe her jawline with the cotton ball. Her sign for chapstick or vaseline is to pretend to be putting on vaseline on her lips with her pointer finger. She started to use the sign for "hat" to also mean "sunglasses", so she's generalizing there. There's a new sign that she's been doing yesterday and today that we thought we figured out but it's not quite clear. Last night she started to clearly show us something, so we started to ask her what we thought she meant. Her response was no to all of our suggestions, so finally I opened the door and asked her to show me. I followed her straight to the refrigerator, and upon my picking up the bag of grapes, she smiled. I cut them up for her and handed her the bowl, and she snacked on them without making the sign again. So we showed her the corrected version of the sign for grapes and she copied it pretty well, and we were all snug that we figured her out. But today when she started with the same sign and I handed her the bowl of cut up grapes, she didn't want it. Now I'm back to being stumped again.
As for verbal language, she is slowly starting to utilize this mode as well. She repeated "goal" (ok, in Spanish/Polish "gol" upon lifting the flap in one of her books showing a kid kicking a soccer ball into the mesh.)
