“Mommy… Daddy…” (I repeated this over and over at the top of my lungs after I was tucked in bed tonight). Daddy finally came in to see what I wanted.
Daddy: What do you need?
Me: (looking at a picture in my book) Why does this girl have 1… 2… 3… 4… arms? I only have 2. Where are my other arms?
Daddy: (very confused look for a moment) Oh! She doesn’t have 4 arms. She only has two. The book is showing – see the number 1??? – where her arms start, that she moves them away from her, and then comes back lower on her tummy and does it again. It’s like she’s drawing two stripes on her tummy.
Me: Like the zebra’s stripes.
Daddy: Yep.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I was reading “An Alphabet of Animal Signs” by S. Harold Collins et al. For each letter of the alphabet it has a drawing of an animal and a drawing of how the American Sign Language sign is made for that animal. The girl was signing “zebra” which is like painting two stripes across your chest/tummy. (Note: Daddy just Googled it and there is no single officially agreed upon sign for zebra, but this book does use a “two stripe” approach – do one stripe and then a second one lower on your body)