Whenever I find a new interesting book, or a new system, or a program – I am dying to find out how it works for other kids, other parents.  So, I thought it would be helpful to other parents to share some things that we’ve tried with our kids, what worked and what didn’t.  Since we just had a new baby, it’s easy to start right from day one!

• Newborn – first month
• 1 month old miracle!
• 2 months old giraffe hunter
• Hang on there! Three months old hanging for 12 seconds!

Newborn

Materials that we are using

• “How Smart is Your Baby?” by Doman – see our book review.
• “What Babies Say Before They Can Talk : The Nine Signals Infants Use to Express Their Feelings” by Paul Holinger, Kalia Doner
• Newborn Baby Swimming
• Elimination Communication method

We also should have started using this one to establish good sleeping routines, but we, in all honesty, forgot about it…

• The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night by Elizabeth Pantley

What are we doing:

“How Smart is Your Baby”
We skipped the first evaluation. Actually, first days are stressful enough for everybody (mom, dad, baby, big brother), so pinching, flashing lights, banging – seemed like too much. Besides, interacting with the baby, we could see how he would do in those tests anyway: the big brother wouldn’t miss an opportunity to bang the doors, to bang the wooden toilet seats (doesn’t it sound like “blocks” command?), as we pass from room to room we just paid attention at the baby’s reaction as the lights got turned on and off. He was doing just fine.

We decided to skip all unpleasant exercises. Our “Nine Signals Book” indicates the positive feelings should be maximizes, and the negative – reduced as much as possible to let the baby outgrow it. So, which exercises we actually did?

Motor Opportunity.
Balance Activities – all of them. There are just 15 exercises that usually include moving baby in different ways (from side to side, over the head, on the floor on the mat, rocking in the chair, etc.). And they are should be done just once a day! That was possible on most of the days, besides we had great success with those exercises with our older son when he was a baby. To keep track of the exercises I created and printed out an MS Excel file, that I might upload soon. Let me know if you’re interested. The only one our baby disliked is “flying over the head”, so we did it very little – only for a few seconds, to prevent an upset grimace.

Infant Crawling Track: an ingenious idea for helping babies learn how to crawl. It looks like a board with two walls, open on the opposite ends. The walls help baby push, and to avoid flipping himself over all the time – to learn forward movement instead of being stuck at the “rolling from one side to another” stage. The track can be positioned at an incline, to let gravity help the baby learn how to move forward instead of pushing himself back. Pushing himself backwards used to be terribly frustrating to my first one, so this simple solution – inclining the crawling surface – sounds terrific to me!!!

We were anxious to try the crawling track. We’ve got the standard crawling track from the IOHA. We found it on ebay. Actually this track greatly disappointed us: we should had built it ourselves. The track we’ve got has a very nice surface, but otherwise is quite bad – it is not sturdy, the velcro holders fell off within the first weeks, it started overhanding in the middle once the baby grew bigger. By three months we just put a large board underneath, and it made a world of difference.

So, we didn’t like the crawling track itself, but still were very excited about using it. How did our baby like it? He didn’t. At all. Sleeping in a track? Forget it! He thought it’s a hideous idea. We’d hold him in our hands until he is fully asleep, carefully lay him on his tummy and anxiously watch him wake up immediately. We’d warm that place on the track where we were putting him down, we covered him with cozy blankets… we were planning to put him down for a nap in a track a few times a day while we are right next to him, but it never happened. Our newborn can’t read yet (just yet ), so he was completely unaware that he should actually enjoy sleeping on his tummy, and crawling in his sleep.  Instead, even if we managed to put him there without waking him up, he’d start waling immediately upon waking up!  Well, I am persistent.  I’ve tried, and tried, and then gave up – apparently, my baby is more persistent, then I am.

How about crawling?  Well, that one worked!!!  The baby was able to crawl a little right from the first day that we came from the hospital.  We were ecstatic.  Did he like it?  Again, he hated it.  And since we don’t believe that infants cry “to exercise their lungs” (what nonsense!  cry is the only way for babies to communicate and we’ll let our baby believe that we don’t love him or will ignore his pleads for help?!), our newborn wasn’t crawling much either.  Yet, as I said, I am very persistent.  So we kept trying.  While his fussing sounded more like it is just a very difficult thing to try – i.e. baby’s version of grunting – we’d let him continue.  As soon as we had a suspicion, that he is actually crying (it’s hard to distinguish – we relied on intuition), we’d pick him up immediately and cover his adorable face with kisses.  If we had it right – he was actually grunting – then our baby would calm down immediately and happily continue with other exercises we had for him.  If we missed that moment and picked him up even a few seconds later then we should have, he’d let us know by pitifully sobbing for a few minutes.  But the later scenario was rare.

Manual Competence program: five thumbs up! I’ve read about this even before we discovered Doman. We did those exercises for my niece and nephew a decade ago. We did them for my own first baby. Now our second one was enjoying being pulled up while he was holding onto our fingers. I can’t even describe the look of amazement and excitement on his face as we were doing this! And, obviously, we shared his feelings. The only funny (and, actually, new to us!) thing was our baby’s preference for mommy’s fingers. My husband was quite upset, that it took our baby a few months to start liking his fingers for hanging as well. Funny, isn’t it? We like this exercise so much, that once the baby became really good at it and could support his own weight while hanging on my fingers, that became the primary method for picking him up – I just stretch my two thumbs towards him, my baby happily squils and grabs them, and… woosh! He is hanging on my shoulder again, peeking from it as if he is a little curious parrot.

Auditory Competence program (banging wooden blocks to get the baby to startle): as I said, we skipped it.  Doesn’t sound right.

Tactile Competence program (reinforcing Babinski reflex): the baby doesn’t mind at all, it is very easy to do during massages, during diaper changes, even while eating. So, why not? We did that quite faithfully.

Visual Competence program (lighting a flashlight in his eyes): I wasn’t really sure how our baby would take it, so  I let him decide.  Nope, he didn’t like it.  Actually, he proved me wrong: he didn’t mind the lights in his eyes at all.  What our baby didn’t like – was the darkness!  In the first 2 months he really hated the dark and started fussing as soon as we’d walk into a dark hallway or I’d turn out the lights.  Again, he doesn’t know how to read yet, so he is not aware, that after 9 months is the darkness of the womb, he should find reduced lighting calming.  Quite the opposite – I think he had enough of the darkness and now was eager to see as much as he could!  Besides, for that exercise, my firstborn should be out of the picture – he is not really thrilled about the darkness either.  So, I could do this exercise only after my first one goes to bed – and at that time we usually did a massage for the baby, bath and – finally! – all exasted parties would depart to bed (i.e. the baby and his tired crazy parents).

Language (regular conversations with the baby, leaving lengthy opportunities for him to respond; reading poems together and eventually skipping some words for the baby to fill in): this is one of our most favorite recommendations in the book! We have so many of the “Doman-like” conversations with our baby, that we frequently skip all other exercises in favor of a few additional minutes of just “chatting”. Poems are lots of fun too – by 2 months our little one started giggling and laughing as soon as I merely mention a possibility for reading some poems together!!!

Swimming: yahoo!  That one was lots of fun.  As soon as the doctor allowed us to take a bath, we ran right into the adult’s large bathtub, filled it in with warm water (~95-96F) and happily let our newborn enjoy his first bath.  And his first water massage.  The techniques we used are described here Newborn Baby Swimming, but the videos that we found, unfortunately are available only in Russian.  So, our baby wasn’t really swimming, as I mentioned in that article – we looked at it more as a water massage.  Regardless if you plan to do anything of this sort, I’ve got to say it again: bathing a baby in a big tub is far-far-far easier, then using those tiny bathtubs specifically for little ones!  I just put baby’s head on the palm of my hand, I let the baby’s body float, arms flare and spash, him – learn how his balance works in the water.   To get baby used to the colder temperatures (to make his health stronger), after the first 2-3 weeks we lowered the temperature to 93F. Baby didn’t mind at all.

Elimination Communication: I was really stressing out how to incorporate that one – most of our exercises require some protection from the accidents; we like to keep our home temperatures quite low, since we believe it is healthier for everyone and yet we really wanted to give EC a try. Well, I was surprised to see how well it worked out. Is our kid “out of diapers”? Far from it! It wasn’t even a goal. The goal was to make our little one aware of what’s going on right from the start; occasionally “catch” something on the potty and keep it as a part of our routine, as a part of our way of understanding our baby. Despite the fact, that we have tons of clothes in laundry every day, and we went through many-many diapers, I still can say that we are successful in our goals. I was worried how we’ll know WHEN to sit the baby on the potty: it was amazing, but the intuition really was our primary tool. I noticed, that if I think that potty could be a good idea, it’s time to grab the baby and put him on the potty! Only rarely he wouldn’t go. My intuition, which is usually not particularly strong, worked so surprisingly well… when I was concentrated only on the baby. As soon as I got distracted (my older kid, or a conversation with someone), there will be a miss. And again. And again. Well, that didn’t discourage me – being diaper free by the end of the first month, wasn’t our goal! If we were somewhat successful and understanding each other and tunning into each other – that was already the greatest success we could hope for!

Results

: happy, healthy, gained 2lb!

… to be continued.

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Related posts:
• Baby’s Physical Development: crawling, creeping and brachiating
• Fishing in a salad bowl – small motor development (inspired by Montessori)



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