Nisarga

Category: development

  • Two month old using sign language

    Okay, Nisarg is definitely using sign language. I’d thought so earlier.

    Since then, he’s signed “milk” a couple of times more. I’d been trying to get a video, but he does it rather absently, and when I approach with my phone in hand, he starts interacting with me, waving and sucking his fist. Finally, I was able to capture the tail end of it as he got hungry when my mother-in-law was holding him….. Its not very clear, he does it just once, but check out his right hand. He was doing it with both when I came close and stopped 🙁

    Things got ugly real fast after I shot this. We had a crying session. I guess he didn’t appreciate me just sitting there watching him when I could feed him.
    He does it quite well. Maybe I’ll get a better video in a day or two.

  • Two month old signing milk?

    Okay, its likely that I’m over reacting, but twice (for sure, and once unsure) since yesterday evening, we’ve seen Nisarg opening and closing his fist deliberately – the sign for milk. Both times I responded by offering to feed him, and he was hungry and fed well.

    I show him the baby signing time video often because its bright and has music and stuff. He enjoys the music, and watches on and off. I had never thought he was paying attention. Perhaps he isn’t. I also do the sign for milk while I’m feeding him. That is something he definitely notices, as he is always looking intently at me as he feeds. I think he has realized that the sign for milk is accompanied by or followed by a feed.

    Now, the question is if this is a coincidence or deliberate?

    Everything I’ve read about baby sign language indicates that babies don’t start signing till they are 6 months old, as they don’t have that kind of coordination till then. On the other hand, Nisarg is definitely opening and closing his hands when he is hungry. It is not a very proper opening and closing – more like an uncurling of his fingers and curling back – neither does he make a proper fist, nor does he make his fingers completely straight.

    It is quite likely that I’m imagining things.

    On the other hand, a friend who runs a developmental toys library made an insightful comment when I told her about Nisarg letting me know when he wants to pee. She said, “They are telling us a great many things all through. It is about how observant and intuitive we are.” She thought it was a sign of my sensitivity and attention that I picked up his cues and we had a day without wetting a single diaper.

    So I like to think that Nisarg is making the sign for milk. Whether he is actually trying to tell me, or simply hungry and remembers that sign as associated with feeding, I don’t know. He does it quite absently, like he is when he is talking to himself. As opposed to when he coos to us. So I think maybe he remembers the sign when he is hungry, without actually signing for us as such.

    I’ll try to shoot a video and post it here, and you guys can tell me what you think.

    Update: I tried this time when he did it, and he got distracted and started interacting with me…. So no go. Will try again when he does it.

  • Brillkids – does it work?

    early learningRecently, a friend asked me about my fascination with the Brillkids softwares. Does it actually work? They ARE very expensive!

    The way I look at this is that the Brillkids softwares – both Little Reader and Little Math are tools. How effective they are depends on how well you use them. A committed parent could get more results out of chart paper and marker pens than one who gives up with the Brillkids Little Learner (as they are collectively called).

    That said, they are infinitely better than that chart paper and much more convenient than flashcard sets. I’m trying to use flash cards with Nisarg and discovering that it is definitely a skill that takes serious honing. Take for example teaching him about family. What I’m doing is with many members of the family, but for the purposes of this example, lets take just Raka, me and Nisarg.

    This resulted in 6 two sided picture and word flash cards. Mother, father and Nisarg in two languages and photos on the other side. Now, this still leaves space for Vidyut, Raka and baby, but that’s more cards. Close relatives I’d like him to learn are at least grandparents, uncle and aunts. Its a logistical nightmare to have physical cards, not to mention learning to flash them at a speed fast enough to lead to effective right brain learning.

    That takes me to power point slideshows. At least Mistakes can be corrected painlessly. More than that, I can copy paste stuff to create the slide shows. With the addition of the Open Cards extension, I can flash them quite well too. Much better. There are several slideshows I can download, and creating new ones is easy enough. I can add sound files, so that anyone can show Nisarg his cards without worrying about what to say, when to flip and so on.

    The next stage in this journey is the Little Reader. I can add several audio files for a word, several images. So that each time it says Mother, it can speak in a different voice – Raka’s, my mother-in-law’s, mine… and show different photos of me. Entertaining and holds his interest and can be set up really fast for the variety it outputs. Not to mention that I don’t need to create a thing to teach him body parts (for example). The community shares files. I can benefit from someone else’s efforts as others can benefit frommine. 10 people can teach kids 10 things for the effort of one. Plus I can add videos, create playlists and there are even lesson plans that I can simply play directly, when I don’t have the time to invest in planning all that.

    I have ended up discovering stuff on some subject by downloading a file for Nisarg.

    I am a busy person. This kind of quality and ease of use makes it far more interesting and sustainable in the long term for me.

    As for Little Math…. Beats flashcards a million times over. You have to have used the physical number cards to know how awkward they are to handle, let alone “flash”, major learning curve and not particularly exciting for me. Creating cards or powerpoints with quantities to 100….. forget it.

    Powerpoint is still good if you can lay your hands on some of the ready files for 100 numbers. Of course Open Cards flashes them for you. If you want to show random cards….. Numbers and dots mixed…. or anything different, you first gotta hunt a file for it, unless you have the patience to create it yourself. In which case, Pleeeease send me a copy?

    And Little Math? Hold on to your seat. Show dots, images, customize to use pink panthers and blue trucks, or whatever your child enjoys watching in the place of dots. Show in sequence, randomize, with audio, placed random or in grids, ….. and I haven’t even started talking about equations and fractions and stuff.

    So? Does it work? Works for me!

  • 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…..

  • 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.

  • Brillkids to speed up your baby's learning

    early readingResearch 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.

  • Baby weight gain and bonnissan

    I had written earlier about how Nisarg was having problems with gas and diarrhoea and the doctor had prescribed Bonnisan. Then I wrote about how after just two days, Nisarg had normal baby poop for the first time in his life.

    Well…. half a month later, we haven’t had a single loose bowel movement yet, and Nisarg is filling up quite well, with chubbying cheeks and slight hints of plumpness that we associate with babies. I don’t think he’s ever going to be one of those round babies, but hey, he’s healthy, active and putting on weight steadily. He also put on an inch in height – he’s now 22 inches.

    I don’t know what he weighs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s put on a kilo from the last appointment to the next.

    Maybe its just regular growth, but I’m of the opinion that the Bonnissan really helped. He just was cranky (for him) and slow to grow since the gas set in till before we started with it.

  • Right brain development in infants

    There is a wealth of information on right brain development in infants and how it can’t be started early enough and resources and all that. Like any other obsessed mother out there, I’m researching ways to entertain him in a manner that stimulates his development, and so far am doing pretty much exactly what came instinctively anyway.

    Talking a lot to him, teasing him to win those smiles, carrying him around and showing stuff, making funny faces and exaggerated actions, etc.

    The funny part is that the actions get him looking all solemn and puzzled at me when I’d have thought he’d laugh. He looks like he wants to ask “Hey, you okay? You seemed fine a minute ago”

    What I’m planning to do:

    1. Flash cards. He still sleeps most of the time, and seems supremely uninterested in the flashcards most of the time. So I guess this is going to be an acquired taste. At the moment, he’ll look at the cards very briefly and mostly look at my face as though trying to figure out what in the world I’m trying to do.
    2. Touch: He gets his massage and bath every day, and we often cuddle at bedtime. Other than that, he loves touch in general. Stroke his head, body, face-but-NOT-nose, and he’s virtually purring. I give him lots of other stuff to touch too – the plastic of his toys – hard, soft, bags…, rubber mat, soft cotton swaddling cloth, other cloth materials, sponge, wood, …. whatever we can lay our hands on
    3. Smell: So far, we like a couple of perfumes and sneeze at frying smells from the kitchen. Vicks , milk and baby powder are at the top.
    4. Movement: I carry him around in my arms, in a sling…. lift him high, dance with him in my arms, … He pretty much enjoys it all indiscriminately
    5. Mimicry: I do all kinds of stuff for him to copy. So far we have managed to stick our tongues out (both imitating me and when told), clap (sort of) and blink. He will suck instead of kiss, and we understand the sign for milk (I like to imagine), but can’t copy. I guess he’s too hungry and small to focus while hungry yet. Thing is, he enjoys all this stuff and is mostly waving arms and feet full power with that undecided half-smile on his face.
    6. Music: He likes most music (other than a couple of really loud songs, and Anup Jalota) Favourites being nursery rhymes in Marathi, and Usha Uthups Karadi Rhymes followed closely by Shakti and Ghulam Ali.

    And here I am, saying that I don’t get to do much because he sleeps so much. I guess its more about being aware of how much we are doing.

  • Teething before 2 months

    Is Nisarg teething?

    Everyone I shared this doubt with thinks I’m nuts. For one, he was born early. For another, he’s not even two months old yet. Its supposed to begin after four months and supposed to be even later for babies who come early.

    Since yesterday, he’s been fussy on and off for no apparent reason. I put him down to nap, then he wakes up almost immediately after, except for the night, which so far continues to be blessedly smooth.

    He’s suddenly started drooling, biting his fingers and sometimes (rarely) sucking his knuckles. I can see two white bits under the gum where his two lower front teeth could come. I can also feel those teeth with my finger, though they are inside.

    To me, it really seems like he’s teething.

    Dayum, this motherhood thing is one thing after another. Seems just yesterday I was complaining about not being able to sleep because of backaches from a huge front. Now, I can sleep very well, but am still exhausted. First the birth, then coming home, breastfeeding every two hours, diarrhoea, gas pains, figuring out pee communication, worrying about his weight gain all through and just as I was celebrating two days of a regular healthy infant, its now this teething thing, or something that seems remarkably like it.

    Anyone else had a child that teethed this early? Developmentally, he should be counted a month old or something. He’s still very tiny and not on the weight charts for his age at all. I’m just hoping that this doesn’t create a setback in his weight gain….