"Brought Tears to My Eyes": Deaf Grandpa Interacts With Baby Granddaughter via Sign Language

An adorable video of a deaf grandfather using sign language to communicate with his infant granddaughter is going viral on TikTok and proving that expressions of love transcend language.

The overwhelming joy Mara McCullough's (@mara_mccullough) dad has for his granddaughter is palpable in the viral clip, and there are throngs of other users on the platform who think so as well.

"Just a hearing girl and her deaf grandpa," reads a text overlay on the video, which shows the man seated on the floor, using sign language to communicate with the infant who is nestled inside a bassinet-style sleeper.

Per the captions on the video, Grandpa signs to his granddaughter: "Did you sleep well? Oh! You hiccuped!"

"Did you sleep well? What did you dream about?" Grandpa continues to sign to the baby, who watches the man as he moves his hands around to communicate with the child.

The clip then transitions to the man counting on the feet of the baby. "You have five toes," he informs the baby lovingly. "Ten toes total!" he signs after individually counting them out.

At this point in the video, Grandpa is addressing the person recording the video. "She is very observant," he signs to the recorder. "She doesn't want to miss anything, she's always looking around at her surroundings."

"When it comes to sounds and visuals, she doesn't miss anything," he adds, before directing his attention to the baby again. "Right?!" he signs to her.

"See, she kind of jumped when I said right. Do you agree with me?"

The next portion of the video shows Grandpa holding the child in his left arm as he points around his surroundings, "Pretty! (talking about the backyard)," another on-screen caption of the video reads.

Grandpa can then be seen walking outside, cradling the baby in his arms as he walks off into a wooded area until he stops by a tree and points to something for the infant to see: "Funny, there's an anole (lizard) sitting right by the bees," he signs.

The TikToker shows this off on camera, using a green arrow emoji to point out where the anole is. The video then cuts to Grandpa, still outdoors with his grandbaby, looking into the camera and praising the kid for her love of mother nature.

"She loves being outdoors. She gets very excited; I know that because I can feel her legs and body tense up / kick in excitement every time we go outside," he signs to the person recording the TikTok.

"She loves it, she likes the sound of the leaves crunching ... she loves it, she gets wide eyed," he continues, walking the infant around outdoors to check out the world before her.

"We put last year's Christmas tree here in the woods," he adds, pointing to a piece of land in the backyard that he's exploring with his grandchild. "We also put the Christmas tree from two years ago back there."

"I'll do the same with our next Christmas tree, recycle them back into the earth, decompose as opposed to throwing it in the trash," he signs, narrating into the camera while still holding the child.

The video ends with Mara's baby smiling into the camera as her grandfather plants a kiss on her forehead.

TikTokers who saw the video had their hearts melted by the interaction. One user on the app wrote: "Sign language baby babbling has got to be one of the cutest things in existence."

Someone else noticed that the child's hands were moving in what seems like an attempt to emulate her grandfather's signaling: "Her fingers are just a wiggling! She’s going to be fluent in sign before she goes to kindergarten!"

According to Boston University, studies have shown that kids who communicate with deaf parents from a young age are able to manage their attention spans effectively by the time they reach preschool.

"Deaf babies who learn sign language from their parents learn to manage their attention by the time they reach preschool, according to earlier research by [Amy Lieberman, assistant professor of deaf studies in the BU School of Education]," the university's article states.

As Lieberman said for the article: "They look up to see a sign and down to connect the sign to an object. They do so in meaningful and purposeful ways."

This would mean that, presumably, Mara's baby, if she continues to see her grandfather communicating with her through sign language, could be hitting the ground running with signaling. Not to mention she'll have developed a very beautiful/strong relationship with her mother's dad.