Clapping

It has been a fun week this week with Sophia. I know that babies learn by watching and mimicking but this week we got to watch her first learn how to clap and then learn the word clap. It started when my mom was here. We were cheering and clapping for something that Sophia did and as we were clapping she was really quiet and looking intently at us. Then about a minute later she clasped her hands together. I thought that maybe it was a fluke so we tried again. Same thing. She wasn't able to separate her hands once she had them clasped together so she would just move them up and down clasping them together. So we spent the week trying to learn how to clap. I would sing "Clap, clap, clap your hands, clap your hands together" and would clap my hands, then would take Sophia's hands and do the same. About midweek she began to take our hands and clap our hands together. She still could not figure out how to open her hands and clap. Instead she would have her hands sort of balled up and trying to hit them together. By the end of the week she figured it out and now she loves clapping. She does it all the time. On Sunday her babysitter at church said, "She even knows the word 'clap'" and sure enough when we could tell Sophia to clap without cheering, singing the song or any other visual cues she would clap. It is really fun to watch her learn. Now I am inspired to take a baby sign language class because I can see how babies can do hand signals and understand what is going on long before they can talk.