Baby Carrying

The single most important child rearing practice to be adopted for the development of emotional and social healthy infants and children is to carry the newborn/infant on the body of the mother/caretaker all day long...   James Prescott, Ph.D., developmental psychologist

 

It's good to have mother-child contact all day long, but in that case moms will need extra-hands to be able to do something else. When having more than one child, the case of perpetual contact is basically not real, and sometimes a feeling of guilt can appear. Some psychologists advise there should be at least 10-20 min baby carrying in every gap between baby's naps. Besides, skin-to-skin contact is important for the baby to feel safe and comfortable.

 

Inspired by Autumn

Maria 3y. 4 m.

Autumn seems to be the most inspiring season, it stimulates creativity and motivates for arts and crafts. We enjoy lots of world famous masterpieces  created by the well-known artists, we read lots of poems devoted to the autumn time. The changes in nature happening in autumn such as leaves changing their colour and animals preparing for the winter are so diverse and so colourful that one can't miss it.

We could not neglect autumn time inspiration either and indulged ourselves with the autumn crafts:

1.     Autumn in the forest  - of course none can compare with the Autumn-Artist but still we tried to reflect our autumn mood on the paper. Maria painted colourful background, glued pieces of journal paper, which were supposed to depict birch-trees, and, then, finger-painted leaves on the trees.

 

 2.     Maria was dancing all around with the rowan beads and a bracelet we made together. This was a good exercise for the little fingers when she was putting rowan on the string with the help of the needle.

 

 

3.     Making a geometry ship recalled Maria about the basic geometric forms, which she was painting with the excitement for the ship to have beautiful sails. Later we enjoyed our ship floating in the nearest pond.

Overall the ship-building process was pretty easy and fast: a) put the paper sails on the chopsticks; b) made three holes in the plastic bottle for the chopsticks with sails and a nail in the back; c) tied a ribbon for our construction not to collapse after few minutes of sailing; d) the ship is ready for grand sailing! (not to forget to tie up some string to be able to steer the vessel)

4.      Acorn man, acorn dog and some strange creature J Maria was rather a passive observer this time, but an active acorn hunter.

 

Black’n’White

Andrew 2 m.

It’s well-known that the newborn babies cannot see the objects clearly and can’t distinguish the colours until up to three months old. The best distance for the baby to study smth is around 20 cm, which corresponds to the distance from the breast to mom’s face meaning that the ideal time for studying mom’s face is breast-feeding.

What babies are fascinated by (of course, after parent’s facial expressions) are the contrasts of the dark and light and specifically, black and white. Other colours, which are the first for the newborn to recognize are red and orange.

Based on this knowledge, together with Maria we prepared a training for Andrew – coloured in black some paintings  as well as made a rattle (made out of Pringles chips box, which we filled up with macaroni and taped the top of the box with black’n’white Mary’s drawing). Andrew’s reaction exceeded all expectations! =) he was amazed by these contrast papers and could stare at them for quite a long time. It was an excellent help to keep Andrew happy on his belly (which is usually the most disliked activity of the newborns).

Big City Life

Mary 3y. 4m.

Once we went to the airport to see off our dad, who was going to the business trip. Maria was soo excited by the view from the window, by the infrastructure of the airport, by the planes taking off and landing, that I could hardly persuade her to go back home finally.. had to pay the whole fortune for the parking .. oops..

 

When came back, we studied the planes and other means of transport we could find in our kid’s encyclopedia as well as watched some youtube films on the topic. The buildings and other city’s infrastructure, however, we studied in a more interactive way. We build the whole city on the piece of paperboard: organized the traffic with traffic signs and lights, planted and painted the trees, built houses with glued windows, parked some cars (everything was done by Maria except me cutting off the trees and traffic lights, and drawing the roads). She enjoyed building the city, though less playing with it. The city, however, was valued more by other kids coming to us.

Another thing we made was an outside activity, when we were drawing with the chalks. To make it more interesting there were some tasks for Maria and her friend to fulfill:

1.       Maria and our small neighbour Nick were given some paper stuff (e.g. doctor, airplane, animals etc.). They had to find the right place where to stick them to:

·         Doctor – hospital (hint: red cross);

·         Animals – zoo (hint: cages);

·         Plane  - airport (hint: runways);

·         Vegetables – shop;

·         Train – railway.

2.       Had to find and draw waves in the swimming pool.

3.       Finish drawing the railway.

4.       Draw some traffic lights

Maria added the sun placing it near the airport and other colourful dots saying these are the planets. So, we decided it is no longer an airport but the planetarium and a spaceport.J