Working on the non-verbals

Now that the girl has fully mastered norwegian babble, she's been working on things more sophisticated than actual words, like non-verbal communication.

Since the other day, she's been offering elaborate conversations, all in babble, but accompanied with complex movements of the head, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, shoulders, arms, and hands. Hips are not excluded, either. She knows exactly what she's saying. We don't, though we are certain she is drop dead serious; there's no mistaking that.

There are very clearly multiple levels of communication going on: explanation, exclamation, negotiation, rationalization, interrogation, collaboration. All that in the hands, though mostly in the shoulders lately.

She's really concentrating on developing her shrug. It's already close to perfection. She'll lift the arms and twirl the hands for extra expression. She'll do it repeatedly to get it just right. It may be a shrug to express delight or to shift the blame. The repetition gives us several tries to understand, as if it weren't clear the first time.

She's furrowing and raising eyebrows. Shaking, nodding, bowing, tilting, turning the head. Raising, folding, flapping, crossing the arms. Pointing, wagging, waving fingers.

I could go on and on. I didn't know the body was capable of such expression, especially not from a 1-year old. Scarier: she's observing all this elsewhere, carefully recording this, seeing, studying, downloading and installing, learning and practicing.

Maybe even from us.