Tips to help baby crawl

Okay, so your baby is still not crawling. Maybe he's 5 months old, or just born..... we are all eager to see them crawl.

Okay, the first thing to realize is that a newborn put on the mother's stomach will crawl up to suckle (often, if not mostly). So crawling is not that big a difficulty. However, if you are talking about crawling to actually get somewhere significant.... you're going to soon wish he was getting into less things, but hey, here are some tips anyway.

1. Put baby on stomach when awake. Really, there is no such thing as too much. Reassure, comfort, pick up, whatever, but if you're putting the baby down awake, its the stomach that must be down. Really, a baby on the back is rather like a turtle on its shell. How will any crawling happen? Its definitely a learning by doing thing, and doing needs opportunity.
2. Be excited about it: Be thrilled by the fact that baby is on the stomach. Praise, laugh, get all thrilled, and chances are that baby will think its a good thing after all. A great tool if the baby is still undecided about how this stomach thing is.
3. Join your baby. On the floor. Yep. Go ahead, crawl yourself, and he may get some ideas.
4. Use toys and stuff. Your baby may not even seem to notice them, but they have. Babies are smart and quite curious about stuff. He may not seem to show interest initially, but leave him quiet for a bit, and he'll get all curious about the toy and want to get it. This needs crawling of course.
5. Acknowledge efforts. Really, praise everything, even if baby has feet in the air. If he feels good about trying rather than feeling burdned by expectations he doesn't understand, chances are that he's going to want to spend time investigating this new experience.
6. Interpret - interpret everything as success.. If baby waves hands and feet, he's going to end up moving in some direction or the other - fabulous. Cheer!

Use firm surfaces. A soft fluffy something is only going to bunch and absorb all baby's efforts and discourage him.

Leave arms and feet (particularly) bare and cover torso. This will give more grip to the parts that will push, and more slipperiness to the parts that will slide and make movement easier. Basically, what we are doing is simply creating an opportunity for the baby to discover that moving his limbs on the floor ends up moving his body. Once he gets that, start reorganizing your home to get rid of all baby-non-proof things at floor level.....

Mother development

I used to think of myself as a pretty self aware person. And sure, to a great extent, I am. But then, the self is like an onion the more layers you peel off, the tastier the core remains.

Nisarg is throwing me into a new learning curve as a person. It is impossible to have masks with infants. They operate on such a primitive level, that they simply don't comprehend the masks. I may talk of patience and being there for him at 4am in the morning, but he knows what I will never verbalize - sleep, damnit!

Needless to say, it doesn't work. Then, as my impatience shows through, he gets agitated. Eventually, exhausted, I'm beyond impatience, and what he sees is what he gets. A limp, sleepy mom. And suddenly sleep sounds like a good idea to him too.

Approaching the same situaiton in another way, I could say that my moods transfer to him. If I'm tense, I will never be able to get him to relax. If I'm waiting for him to sleep, he's waiting right along with me.....

I may talk baby talk with him, but when I enjoy myself, I get gummy grins. When I'm just talking to "make him quiet" I get hurt and puzzled looks as he shreds my heart by looking into my eyes when he cries.

Many inexplicable situations later, I'm slowly starting to question the honesty of my behaviour. Sure. I'm honest to some extent. But what is the real issue? What are my feelings for my son that I disown because they are not "appropriate"?

This reminds me of some comments I got on my poem "What you see is what you get" on facebook and in my emails. The essence is:

A child gives birth to a mother.

The teacher comes as the humble student.

I think it is important that I remember that juust because I happened to be born earlier doesn't mean that I know it all. Just because he is dependent on me doesn't mean that the vast learnings he brings me are to be less respected than the most insightful guru around. Just because he isn't a famous guru doesn't mean that he is any less effective in transforming my life.

Its incredible how when I strip off all the facades, resign myself to the demise of all pretences and embrace the joy of simply being; how much joy I am able to spread. How much caring I am able to convey. How much support I am able to contribute.... How much MORE I am, just because a pint size teacher chose to be naked and embrace life with open arms.

Baby Signing Time

Okay, so I'm on a roll with educational resources for babies. Another absolutely awesome resource dropped into my lap last week. A friend with a grown up baby gave me the first episode of - Its Baby Signing Time!

The idea being that babies develop an awareness about their needs and desires long before they are able to express them. Thus, babies often cry out of frustration, because they are unable to get their needs met.

Teaching them the baby (read very basic) version of sign language empowers them to communicate more fluently with you, thus removing much of the stress of guesswork for both of you.

There is an additional bonus - research shows that children who gesture a lot learn to speak early and develop better mental abilities.

There are supposed to be four episodes, though I've seen only one. What we saw, we liked. Nisarg was entranced with the lively music and bright colours. I was entranced with how clearly and charmingly the whole thing has been created. Its literally lessons on sign language woven with music, words, and plenty of practice time. I had never imagined that learning could look so much like a fun video. Nisarg doesn't understand anything at all, but approves anyway, if his stare and waving limbs are to go by.

He's still young, but in a month or so, I guess we'll have all the episodes.

Really, sign language is not just for deaf and dumb children, but for all children who are not able to speak - babies qualify.

The torment of (in)decision

How does one go on fighting against all odds? How does one keep struggling to keep a family afloat, when no one else seems to care? How can a man look at his own flesh and blood child and keep coming home drunk? Where does a woman draw the line between giving up too easily and walking away while she can?

What does a mother answer a child curious about a father distanced because of her decisions? What does a mother answer a father about their child she's taking away?

The world is a cruel place. There are many who would like to listen to your woes and gleefully prescribe how things should be. And no "solution" fits the problem.

I'm going through a bad, bad time. Pressured on every front there is - relationships, money, responsibility, scarcity..... Naturally, since its me, it follows that the one place where me having a problem would have an easy answer has no problem. The joy of my life is Nisarg. I feel just peachy to be a mom. Other problems that were already huge before this little guy came are now overwhelming.

There are no easy answers. No one to support me if I walk away from my family, and no one to support the family financially if I walk away. The sorrow is that the only thing to crash in my absence would be the finances. Shows how used I allowed myself to be.

Now, I have a little one to think of. Safety, relationships, life.... I have made the choices that bring me here. He hasn't. How do I go on so that he doesn't suffer for mine?

My little sunflower

Just warms my heart to see,

This tiny piece of me

Full of smiles and coos

He has nothing to loose

As he follows me around with his eyes

When out of sight, he calls with cries

For he is my little sunflower,

And I'm his mother

Brillkids to speed up your baby's learning

Research increasingly shows that the more information you make accessible to your baby, the faster he or she begins using it. This is particularly true when it comes to language and maths.

Babies this age are more "right brained" - they need to be, if they have to learn to understand people, interaction and express themselves. At this age, perception rules. They are constantly absorbing things they are exposed to, and this particularly holds true for language and mathematics. They can understand entire words or quantities as images, and comprehend them enough that a quantity expressed in different ways, or a word written in different fonts/handwriting is quickly identified as the same quantity or word.

All this is happening even before they learn to speak.

Our current ways of teaching children begin well after the child learns to speak. Children learn to read in school, by when they have already moved beyond the formative years when they can grasp these things intuitively and effortlessly.

As more and more parents discover the value of early orientation to fundamental skills, methods which enable such learning to be fun are becoming popular. Flashcards, story books, sign language, DVDs and such resources add value and maximise ease of use. This also directly results in you being able to be consistent and persistent with your efforts.

Two such programs are from Brillkids - Little Reader and Little Math. They literally take out all the guesswork and tedious labour needed to constantly create learning resources and present them correctly. They have trials for download on their site, and I must say I'm hooked!

The only sorrow is that they don't work on Linux, which is what my machine is, though I have a little used dual boot with Windows on it, which should be working (at least it worked a year ago). However, if you have a Windows computer, there really is no excuse for not checking out the trial versions of both of these. The trials are free. And if you wish, you can always buy. (aff. link)

PS: One mystery of life was solved as I read their Teaching baby to read ebook. There is a quote from Janet Doman, daughter of Glenn Doman and director of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, "[At school] we are literally trained to read and talk at the same time. And this is not a good way to teach, because when you and I go to read a book, we subvocalize. We actually are talking, and it means we read very, very slowly. [A baby] will just take in the word, and as you teach him to read and he gets to be a better and better reader, he’s not subvocalizing. " I learned to read very early and was an extremely fast reader, finishing a typical Enid Blyton in an hour and a half flat with distractions and all, could understand "less easy"English like Shakespeare, attempt crosswords and remember pretty much anything I read or was told. The two things I was never able to do were reading aloud and understanding what I was reading at the same time and reading aloud to memorize. The vocalizing probably wrecked my natural learning tempo. This quote explains much!

Tips on teaching a baby to clap

Oooookay, I think we have cracked the clap code (though not actually clapped), which if you consider that Nisarg is not even 3 months yet, is pretty amazing.

The little guy has figured out that its all about swinging his hands together, but doesn't yet have the co-ordination to quite make them meet....

If you want to teach your baby to clap, and he just stares back and blows spit bubbles at you, the following tips might help:

1. Don't hurry. ENJOY the fun you are having with baby, no matter what it ends up as. Babies sense you enjoying yourself, and it tempts them to enter the action you are leading.
2. Pick your time. Don't just pester the poor darling morning and night. The idea is to find a time when baby is alert, awake and quiet.
3. Talk baby talk with your baby. Get his attention. You want him really looking at you, observing.
4. Clap with an exaggerated movement (with an obvious swing of your hands). Laugh and share the joke with baby and do more baby talk.
5. Do this a couple of times, and baby will likely get buzzed enough to wave his hands. Get all excited about that, and clap some more and wait, as though you are fully expecting him to do the same. If baby doesn't respond, fine. Do something else. Repeating clapping a couple of times, or playfully clapping his hands together will work as interactive fun, but don't turn it into a lesson. It will not make him clap, if he stops enjoying it.
   

This is it. The whole session. Praise whatever swings baby makes, and clap in response. Eventually, the little darling is going to figure out how to make the hands meet when he swings them.