Monday, April 20, 2015
Week 29 Early Learning Program
Aria getting ready to hang from a trapeze bar to help develop her hand muscles & upper body strength. She has a strong enough grip to hang freely for a few seconds.
April 12-19, 2014
Age: 29 weeks old (6.5 months old)
Curriculum: inspired by and based loosely on Glenn Doman's How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence and Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby.
Looking at cloud types together
We had a lovely little week. Besides the fact that it was cloudy and rainy almost every day, which really put a damper on my spirits, it was a lot of fun watching Aria develop her knew skill of pulling to stand.
All week she has been pulling to stand on just about everything. Gone are the days where she mostly played on her stomach, and pivoting around or getting up on her hands and knees to crawl to a new destination to play on her stomach again.
Aria pulling to stand on our step stool
Late last week, she started pulling herself up to a kneeling position. Then she started pulling herself up to stand in a very bent over way.
Almost in a complete upright position
By the end of the week she had gotten to the point where she was almost completely upright. It's her preferred position lately. It seems like she just crawls around to find a new place to pull up on. It's so incredible what a week can do!
Standing in crawling track
She most certainly, definitely does not use her crawling track to crawl in anymore. Last week she would sit in it and play. Now she is just so obsessed with standing all she will do in it is stand. She hasn't managed to climb out of it yet. But I suspect that is likely only days away.
Playing on the window.
One of her favorite places is the window. I think that may have been one of her main motivations to learn to pull to stand - so she could see out the window. (And lick it. She really enjoys the feeling of her lips and tongue smearing across the cold window.)
Won't lay still - crawling like crazy
Her crawling is getting to the point where she only crawls because she wants to find something new to pull to stand on.
Crawling off bed into crawling track
Also, she has no fear of heights. She has multiple times went to crawl straight off the bed. I'm trying to let her learn, a little? I will let her crawl and "fall" into the crawling track. But it doesn't bother her at all, so I'm not sure she is leaning anything.
Finger food
Aria has been eating a lot of finger food lately. We started with Gerber Puffs, Cheerios, and Rice Crispies. She just started solids less than a month ago and has no teeth, but she really does great with them. She pretty much just puts the food in her mouth and it dissolves.
Working hard on the prehensile & pincer grasp
Starting finger foods early has the additional benefit of being a great tool for practicing the pincer grasp! It's a great daily fine motor workout for her.
Our picture cards
Our picture cards this week were low altitude clouds & types of triangles. For math we did progressions of 7 (skip counting by 7) with randomized subitization quantity cards. And for written language immersion we had two sets of fruit words & pictures!
Our classical music piece this week was The Barber of Seville: Overture by Gioachino Rossini.
Eating sand
It rained a lot this week, but we did manage to sneak in a photo session at the beach Saturday afternoon, before the storm hit. Aria was loving the sensory sensation of the sand, as usual.
Aria loves swimming
Sunday we had another break from rain for a period in the afternoon, so we took the chance to go swimming.
Blowing in face to help Aria learn to hold her breath
The last few swim sessions we have done, we had just been getting accustomed to the water. She is quite comfortable and happy in the pool now.
So I started teaching her to submerge in water and hold her breath, the first step in independent swimming. The technique I used is to hold her horizontal, rather than vertical. When you hold a baby vertically and dunk them under, water rushes into their mouth and nose simply by the force of gravity. But when a baby is horizontal and you dip their face in, they will only inhale water if they gasp once they're under water.
So, hold baby horizontal, say the prompt (I use: "One, two, three, under!"), then blow in baby's face so they will close their eyes and mouth and hopefully not gasp. Then dip baby's face into the water as quickly as possible - honestly I was only doing it for a half second at a time.
We did this quite a few times and she was happy each time. A little surprised. And a once or twice she did slightly gasp and so she coughed very briefly (I am estimating she only swallowed drops of water, considering how briefly she was underwater and the position she went under).
But that is ok, because it is part of the learning process. The baby has to learn what not to do - what will happen if they don't hold their breath.
However, I do keep it down to three times per session. If baby has swallowed or inhaled water more than three times that day, I stop doing submersions. Even though it is only possible for her to swallow / inhale the most minuscule amount because of my technique. It is just not healthy to inhale or swallow lots of water so I always err on the side of caution.
Looking forward to the rest of the summer and her learning how to swim! Hopefully next week's weather will be kinder to our swimming habits.
Resources used this week:
Low altitude clouds
Types of triangles
Friday, April 10, 2015
Website Problems (That I Hope Are All Over)
Website problems are no fun
To everyone who has tried to access my site over the past few weeks and has failed, I'm sorry.
I've been having the most difficult time getting everything up and running again ever since mid-January when I accidentally deleted everything while trying to switch to a cheaper hosting plan.
Terrible, terrible mistake.
It's been nothing less than a nightmare. I've spent hours on the phone or on chat with a dozen different customer service agents trying to fix each new problem that came up. I spent days procrastinating about fixing the next issue because I just didn't have the time to sit on support for an unknown amount of time. It was all fixed for about two weeks then a new issue came up. And one thing would get fixed only for another one to go haywire.
It was a costly, time-consuming, mind-numbing mistake, and I'm glad it's finally (hopefully) over.
Anyway, I'm thankful that it was eventually fixable. I'm thankful that I now have a real backup. And I'm thankful that in the process of this I was forced to have to find a new design for my site, because I'm liking the new theme a lot (it's not drastically different, but I do have a new homepage which will eventually be really cool).
I'm working on updating blog posts for the past ridiculous amount of weeks that I haven't posted about baby Aria's progress. Once I get that done I'll be sharing about Damien's progress, and eventually Hunter's too.
Here's a little photo teaser of some of the things that have happened in the past few weeks:
Damien (3yr9mo) learned how to ride a two-wheeler
Damien (3yr9mo old) started working through a complete first grade curriculum
I made this cool dot math addition poster
Aria started to crawl (at 4.5 months old)
Aria, at six months, is starting to climb on things and pull herself up to stand
Aria started solids (at six months old)
Hunter (at age 9.5) started going to school, and instead of homeschooling we are doing afterschooling. It's working great!
We built some monkey bars for the kids to develop hand strength (to help with writing and small motor skills), cross patterning, and general upper body strength and fitness.
We added some trapeze bars to those monkey bars for Damien and Aria to build up hand strength on
We started swimming occasionally (mid March), and are getting ready to start this year's "swimming season" where we get in the habit of swimming daily
Aria had her first "real swim" in a big pool and loved it - even though it was a bit chilly. So happy I was lucky enough to be blessed with another "fish baby".
Monday, April 6, 2015
27 Weeks Old Early Learning Program (6 months old)
March 30 - April 5, 2014
Age: 27 weeks old (6 months old)
Curriculum: early learning program based loosely on Glenn Doman's How to Teach Your Baby to Read, How to Teach Your Baby Math, How to Give Your Baby Encyclopedic Knowledge, and Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby.
This week Aria's cards included flags of North American countries (part 2), everyday scenes by Vincent Van Gogh, progressions of 4 with subitization math dots (skip counting by 4), furniture words and pictures, and toy words and pictures.
She loves her cards, especially her math dots!
I had a busy week preparing some future cards for her. She is always super interested and wants to "help".
I spent the beginning of this week finishing up our monkey bar set to help all three kids develop hand strength (good for fine motor control), cross patterning, and general fitness. Aria is getting her very own trapeze bar to hang from!
She spent many hours hanging out on my back while I worked on this project.
Aria has spent a lot of time standing lately. Not fully standing, but leaning over "standing" on a low surface that she climbs up to on her own.
The above picture shows "standing" on my mattress. Her crawling track is next to it.
Playing in her crawling track next to the bed. She pretty much never crawls in it anymore and will either pull herself to stand or sit and play with toys. She reserves her crawling for the floor or bed!
We went to the beach this week. And besides taking a relaxing nap breathing in the salty air, sucking on some fresh watermelon, sipping chilled water and crawling around on the blanket, she had a BLAST playing in the sand.
She had no problem with the texture. She just went to down digging her little hands and arms in it.
This week was also her "first swim". That is, the first time she got into a big pool and got accustomed to moving around in the water. We even dipped her face underwater a couple of times, and she was totally fine with it.
I suppose this marks the beginning of this year's swimming season, here in Florida. April to November, roughly. Getting excited about teaching this little one how to swim!
She tried out some crackers this week too. At first it was fine and she was just sucking on them until they turned to mush. But then she started getting excited and ended up breaking big pieces off, so I had to take it away.
She was not happy about that! We will be getting her some more baby-friendly solids soon.
We celebrated Easter this week. She had fun exploring some new toys and playing with plastic eggs.
Hope everyone had a great week!
Resources used this week:
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