Milestar: 'Tactile Turn-Taking (Video)

One of the milestones we've been looking forward to with Orion is turn-taking.  This is another step in communication.  This communication is not about words, it is about action and play.  When you have a conversation with someone you both take turns sharing your thoughts.  This video shows the action of the little green plant shoot of interactive communication emerging out of fertile soil.

In this video you can see Orion and Dad are using the fingers on the same hand to tap, similar to playing the piano keys.  At first they were tapping each other at the same time.  We knew Orion liked it because he was smiling.  We kept doing this anywhere.

One day, when I arrived at Orion's school at pick-up time, he was fussing.  I touched him and then when I started tapping him we could see he recognized the tapping and he stopped fussing.

Then on December 11th, the coolest thing happened- Orion responded to Dad's taps and they took turns tapping!  The clip I included in the video was the later part of the moment.  You can imagine Thomas' excitement and hurriedly signing, "Get the camera, get the camera!"  As we all know now, we did get something to record the moment… barely!

Since Orion doesn't do tricks when prompted, we're thankful for videos of when he does them naturally- when he wants to do it himself.