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My Signing Baby

About Me

First, I would like to give you a little bit of family history. I am married to my husband Kevin and we have three children - Dagan, who is 10 years old, Corbin, who is 6 years old, and Lauren, who is 3 years old.

Education

I graduated from Missouri Western State College in 2001 with a BA in English, with an emphasis in Technical Communication. In addition to the courses required for my degree, I took two American Sign Language courses as well.

Website Design

I started www.signingbaby.com during my college years, and it was officially born the year after Corbin was - 2000. I began signing with him after I bought Joseph Garcia's SIGN with your BABY from Amazon.com. I had seen an amazing news story about a beautiful baby girl who was able to show her mom that she had teething pain and she would like some infant Tylenol - all without saying a word. Corbin, once he began signing a month later, totally blew me away.

I went to the world wide web to learn more about signing with babies but there wasn't much out there - not what I was looking for, anyway. What I wanted was a site that had photos of babies signing and information about the signing process itself. Most of what was on the internet at that point was commercial in nature, which is fine of course, but not what I needed. I used that (what I needed) to create the site.

It's been an interesting 5 years, and I have learned a lot - about signing with babies as well as web design - in that time. The site has undergone several "looks" and I am finally really happy with what I have created.

Online Store

In 2003, after working in a professional job for 2 years, I received an email from Eric and Kathy Faber - of Kronz Kids, Inc., and producers of the popular Baby See 'n' Sign videos for children - offering to sell me quanities of their products at a discount and then I could resell them. I now know this is the basic premise of retail, but I was happy to explore this "novel" idea. I built an online store and a real, honest-to-goodness business was born in September of 2003, and I resigned from my full-time job to be an at-home mom and a small business owner.

Authoring

In addition to running the site and the web store, I am also excited to announce that I have written a book about signing with babies that is due out in the fall of 2006. The title is "Baby Talk" and is being published by the Tarcher imprint of Penguin.

Teaching

Running the business in this fashion is great - I get to have some income while staying at home and being there for my children. However, I have longed for some more parent-to-parent contact, and started My Signing Baby Classes and Workshops in early 2006 to accomodate this.

I have had many speaking engagements over the years, including one in May 2005 for the St. Joseph School District's Parents as Teachers program that drew over 60 parents and their children. It was great to be able to see so many moms and dads and share with them the beauty of signing with babies.

Personal Experience

I have signed with two of my children. I didn't know about signing with babies when Dagan was small but my other two children benefitted from sign language from a very young age. Both knew well over 100 signs by the time they started speaking. I have done so much reading and video-watching over the years that I have learned so much from that as well as from my children, who loved signing and said so many neat, wonderful and funny things long before they could talk.

Thank You

Thank you for letting me be a part of your baby signing adventure. I hope you have as much fun as I did.

l-r: Corbin, Lauren and Dagan, July 2005