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This piece was written in 1995-1997, when my daughter was small. “Baby signs” have become more popular with hearing parents with hearing children nowadays and I thought I would post this again. My observation of our experience is that we used her signs until she picked up ours. We did not badger her with repetitive signs in a gestural version of “you can say Ma-ma can’t you?” Instead, we used the advantage of deafness to be attuned to her signs. As you will see, she started producing purposeful gestures before she had control of her hands! Those gestures would quite surely have been extinguished if we did not reward them with a response.