What Would the Dalai Lama Do?
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I first came to baby signing the same way I imagine a lot of parents do, even if they won't admit it: I saw someone else's kid do it and was jealous.
I was in the park with my 10-month-old son, Harding, and gave a push to the baby in the next swing. Margo, still quite bald but with an impressive number of teeth for someone a year old, purposefully brought her palm to her mouth and gestured outward. I looked to her mother for an explanation. "She signs," her mom said. "That was 'Thank you.' "
I turned to Hardy, who was gazing off into the distance at a tree or a bird or a cloud. Time to get to work, I thought.
I started with animal noises: I dutifully panted every time a dog crossed our path, and flapped my arms whenever we saw a bird. For three weeks, nothing much happened. Then one morning Hardy pointed at a large, strutting pigeon before I'd even started my dance. He looked at me expectantly, and I flapped my arms harder than ever and said, "Yes, yes, a bird!" The next week, Hardy did his own flapping. (Not exactly official American Sign Language, I realize.)
By age 1 he knew 30-ish signs — for hat, scrambled eggs, and so on — mostly drawn from a baby sign language book. When I heard the Dalai Lama was coming to town, I got really ambitious: I decided to teach Hardy a new sign to welcome His Holiness.
Hardy, his mom, Cathlin, and I live on the campus of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where Cathlin works. I'm a stay-at-home dad, and Hardy and I spend most of our days exploring the seminary's Gothic wonderland. We search for gargoyles, stare at the glory of stained-glass windows. But those carefree days were in the past. Our focus now was on impressing the hell out of our visitor.
So I started right in as we headed out of the apartment for our daily walk. "Buddha," I said. Then I brought my palms together and bowed, repeating the sequence — oh, about 30 or 40 times. My plan was to whisper the code word to Hardy when we met His Holiness, who would be duly wowed.
But Hardy just laughed and turned an imaginary doorknob, his sign for wanting to go outside. He flapped his arms and brought his fists to his mouth, pretending to nibble them like acorns.
Bass, the doorman, laughed. "Hey, mon," he said. "Can't you see the boy wants to go outside to see the birds and squirrels?" Like almost everyone at the seminary, Bass knows all of my son's signs.
It started out innocently enough. One day, I had Hardy demonstrate how he asked for yogurt by moving his hand up and down as if he were milking a cow. After that, the hits just kept coming. We'd do the elephant sign, where Hardy raised his arm up to his nose so it looked like a trunk and gave a bellow (a crowd favorite). Then we'd segue to signs for flower, taxi, and the entire cast of Old MacDonald's farm. His audience, who'd usually never heard of baby sign language, would shake their heads in disbelief and declare Hardy the smartest child they'd ever seen. I'd nod and shrug, but inside I was bursting with pride.
One morning Cathlin gently asked if I thought I might be getting carried away. "With making Hardy perform all the time," she said.
"But he loves it," I said.
"He loves that you love it."
"That's crazy talk," I insisted. "Besides, we're really on to something with this Buddha sign."
