a more silent world

So my 3-year-old son is rapidly learning ASL from me.  It's nothing short of amazing how he is accelerating.  One thing I haven't done much around him though is fingerspelling.  As he learns more, it becomes more difficult for me since I don't know signs for everything under the sun. There are only two cases, though.  Some thing have no signs, and must be finger-spelled, and some things have a sign and I don't know the sign.  How do I deal with this?? Let's take an example:  Octopus.  Clearly this is much to complicated for him to finger spell--if I finger spell this to him he relays back to me "garbage" trying to mimic my hand. Can someone please help me here to understand how kids learn fingerspelling?  Thanks in advance!!

I watched the premiere of Switched at Birth last night, and although people on the show are improving on their signing skill, it seems like even the Deaf characters are using some lazy signing (but mostly the Hearing characters).  Unlike most newbie signers, the Hearing characters have a really decent "flow", but still, I see a lot of lazy signing all around. Obviously, if the show were realistic, we would be seeing choppy, malformed signing for years, which doesn't make for good TV.  What do you all think?