Language!

Because basic motor skills develop before verbals skills, there is a school of thought in the parenting world that advocates teaching your baby sign language. This allows babies to communicate with you before they are able to speak, and avoids some of the inevitable frustration of the baby wanting to communicate something but being unable. To teach your baby to sign you are supposed to very consistently make the sign each time you say the word. We had been half-heartedly doing this with the Wren, practicing with her when we remembered, but not doing it at all if we were tired or distracted. So she completely surprised us when just days after we arrived at the station, she made the sign for "more" during dinner!

"More!" quickly became the hallmark of the station. Instead of asking for more of a certain dish, people would point and make the sign - really reinforcing the Wren's enthusiasm for her new word. Interestingly, she always said the word while making the sign (the sign is putting the first three fingers of both hands together). So knowing the sign didn't seem to save her the trouble of saying the word. Here she is asking for bits of orange, a favorite food - ignoring the bits of bread already on her tray. The Germans like to point out that her version of "more" sounds more like "mehr"(the German word for "more") than the English "more" - after all, she has spent more than half her life so far living in Germany!