May I kvell for a moment? My 13-month old has started Baby Signing in earnest, and I am so proud. My husband and I (and, in fact, our three-year-old, who also was a signing baby) have been demonstrating signs for him for several months, and it looked for a while like it just wasn't going to click for him. Suddenly, the diminutive little lightbulb went on, and he now has signs for telephone, more, all done, diaper, elephant, monkey, fish, dog, sheep, and hat. Added to his few spoken words, Mama, Dada, A-Ma (derivation of his sister's name), kitty cat, bye-bye, night-night and bottle (ba-ba), he has more than doubled his vocabulary due to Baby Signs. I recommend this for any parents of infants/early toddlers and parents-to-be. My daughter commanded dozens and dozens of signs by 18 months, and used some of them (for harder-to-pronounce words like "elephant" and "giraffe") until nearly 2 1/2 years.

Are these just Stupid Baby Tricks? Though it at first may not seem very useful for your baby to be able to sign to you about zoo animals, the point is, Baby Signs allow your baby to communicate, and they get a big kick out of that. When you see the glee on your baby's face when he signs "giraffe" for the print on his footie sleepers, and he hears you say "oh, you see a giraffe?" it makes all the hours of thumping your head, stroking your throat, and flapping your arms worthwhile.