Brandon been having a lot of trouble falling asleep - he just stares straight ahead, eyes wide open, and you can tell that his mind is racing. I hypothesized that he's been trying to figure out the whole "talking" thing, and I think I may have been right, in a way - because today, all of a sudden, he seems to understand that things have names.

Last week he said "owsahheeee" (outside) and "gi-teh" (guitar) a few times, and he started to make the sign for "tree" (approximately) - and he sometimes says "teh" when he's doing it.

This morning I sat down with him to play with his alphabet blocks. Each of them has four pictures of things that begin with that letter. I showed him the picture of the tree and asked, "what's that?", and he happily signed "tree". Then I started showing him other pictures and telling him what they were, and showing him the signs if I knew them. (Some of the pictures are of pretty obscure things - no, I don't know the sign for "yak" or "quail".)

Anyway, I showed him the sign for "mouse" (I tried to find a video - basically you brush your nose with one finger) and he tried to do it. All of his signs kind of look the same, though, so it came out pretty much exactly the same as "tree". I held his hand and brushed it against his nose. He laughed. I showed him the block again, said "mouse", and made the sign for him. He touched his nose!

After that, he started handing me blocks and looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to show him the signs for the pictures on those blocks. Unfortunately I didn't know the signs for any of the Y pictures but I did my best.

A couple of minutes later I went back to the mouse block and asked him what it was. I reminded him by saying "mouse" and showing him the sign. He smiled and stuck his finger up his nose.