It started on a summer day in 1982 when Linda and her twelve-month-old daughter, Kate, were out in the garden. Enchanted by the colorful blooms all around her, Kate pointed to a rose bush, wrinkled up her nose, and sniffed repeatedly. Life with children often slows parents down long enough to "smell the roses," and Linda had often picked them for Kate to smell, all the while saying things like "See the flower, Kate! See the pretty flower!" Clearly, Kate remembered the connection between the sniffing action and the object, and she trusted that the adults around her would, too. For the rest of the day Kate continued wrinkling her nose and sniffing-her sign-for all kinds of flowers, in the house, on her clothes, and in pictures in her books. Kate continued to borrow or create signs for other things she wanted to talk about, like fish, elephants, monkeys, swings, slides, and balls. It wasn't until two weeks later that we realized the significance of what Kate was doing.

As child development researchers, the whole experience left us eager to see if other infants were using signs, too. To find the answer, we began systematically interviewing parents to find out if their babies spontaneously created signs, as Kate had done. Within days of starting our interviews, the answer was clear. Not only did many parents give us examples of signs their babies were using, but the babies themselves would occasionally interrupt our visit to "talk" to Mom, including a sign or two in the process. We learned a great deal from these families, and the more we learned, the more convinced we became that, in their eagerness to communicate, babies creating signs is not an unusual occurrence in day-to-day family life. Many babies spontaneously seem to develop at least a few signs beyond the universal bye-bye, yes, and no, usually sometime between nine and twenty-four months. We also noticed that some babies take to the idea with particular enthusiasm, creating an impressive variety of signs for favorite objects and important needs. Invariably, these babies had families who shared their enthusiasm and encouraged the signing. Moreover, it tended to be the case that the more signs an infant used, the faster that child learned to talk. This was our best clue yet about the effect of the Baby Signs® Program on spoken language development. Signing seemed, if anything, to speed up the process. It was at this point that we knew we needed to figure out a way to help babies along. Thus, we began encouraging parents to purposefully teach their babies a few more signs to help them communicate their basic needs, feelings and interests-anything their babies wanted or needed to "talk" about-until they could talk well enough to communicate with words. And thus, the Baby Signs® Program was born!

The Baby Signs® Program began with baby-created signs-simple movements and gestures that babies themselves took from their routine experiences with the people and things around them. Drawing from songs, games or playful interactions with toys and other objects, babies were finding ways to "talk" before they could talk. For example, several babies we observed twisted their index fingertips together to label spiders-real spiders, pictures of spiders and even plastic toy spiders. What these babies had in common, we discovered, was the experience of learning the Eency Weency Spider song, along with the hand gestures that accompany key words, like "spider," "rain" and "sun." Other babies, we found, stuck their tongues our and "panted" to call their parents' attention to dogs-clearly an imitation of what they saw real dogs doing. Creations such as these not only provided indisputable evidence of how smart babies are, they also showed just how strongly motivated babies are to communicate with the people around them. In these early years, before signing with hearing babies was a well-accepted practice, some parents were reluctant to try signing because, as they told us, their babies were not Deaf. Their babies could hear just fine. At that time, prior to our efforts to get parents to use signs with their hearing babies, signing was seen only as a means of communication for the Deaf. On the other hand, parents were eager to try using signs that our research had shown came naturally for babies. So we provided parents with 50 "sign suggestions,"-simple signs that we had seen babies in our research studies create. We also encouraged parents to watch for their own baby's creations and to create signs themselves when the need arose. This first approach to helping parents get started with our Baby Signs® Program became the heart of the first edition of this Baby Signs book. Published in 1996, it launched the extraordinary Baby Signs® movement that has revolutionized the way today's parents communicate with their babies before their babies can talk.

Little did we know in 1982, when this all began, that 25 years later the Baby Signs® Program would become a worldwide movement. Baby Signs® workshops, classes and trainings are now offered in over 40 countries and Baby Signs® books and products have been translated into almost 20 different foreign languages. Throughout this amazing growth, our mission has always remained the same-to bring the benefits of the Baby Signs® Program to as many families as possible.