It occurs to me that our children change rapidly and we don't record the changes. For example, when did Michele first smile? At about 10 weeks, whereas Cathy was exactly 5 days. At what age did Michele roll over for the first time? I remember it as clear as yesterday but I couldn't tell you at what age. Cathy is trying, and has been, for some time. But she can't quite get the hang of it. We had Cathy at the health nurse the other day. The only thing she said was that Cathy should be lifting her chest off the floor when placed on her tummy. I can't remember what age Michele did this at. I have a picture of it in our kitchen. At what age did Michele roll over from her back to her tummy? I think at about 5.5 months. When did Michele start crawling? At about 7 months. I know it wasn't long after she learned to roll over. She found she could get places by rolling and then drag/crawl the last bit. Cathy is a while away from that yet. Michele crawled before she sat up. I remember this well, as I was concerned that she wasn't sitting. When did Michele cut her first teeth? At 6 months. When did she walk, at age 10 months. She showed signs of walking when we were over at my sister's place in Geraldton. She was then 9 months old. I can't remember when she said said her first word. Mrs Manager thinks she was about 14 months. the word? "Gone". Everything was "gone". We only had 2 bad times with Michele at teething. The first was when she cut her first teeth, 2 of them, bottom gum at the front. She cried and cried and cried. We had no idea what was wrong. We called a lady from our church and she came around and told us what the problem was. The second time was when she was 9 months old. We were at my brother's place at Merredin, W.A. Michele cried and cried and ran a temperature so hot you could roast a bullock on her head. We were scared. And I mean we were really frightened. I remember we got a friend to take us to the emergency room at the hospital. The doctor had a look and said she was cutting her first molars. Two molars at the one time. And that is the only time we ever knew she was cutting teeth. The rest of the time the first thing we knew was when a new tooth appeared. Michele is a really fantastic healthy kid. She is usually co-operative and just loves being involved in what we are doing. She is also a very social child. Her preschool teachers love her caring nature. When one of the kids doesn't show up Michele gets very concerned. Michele learned the whole alphabet at age 2.5 in the space of 6 weeks. At about the same age she learnt to count from 1 to 20. We have lots of DVD's and she loves the learning DVD's the best. But best of all she loves to do what we are doing no matter what it is.
Cathy's miles stones. Smiled for the first time at 5 days. And it was a genuine smile not a "wind" smile. She still smiles. We did things different with Cathy. For starters she is breast fed, Michele was formula fed. Cathy sleeps with us in our bed , whereas Michele has always had her own space. There was a reason for that. First she was a kicker. She could turn side way in the bed, head butt one person and kick the crap out of the other. Second, we were told one shouldn't co-sleep with a baby. We ignore that with Cathy. Mind you there are some people we "forget" to tell. Cathy stays where you put her in the bed and we have never come close to rolling on her. It is also convenient when she needs to be fed in the night. One just flops it out and Cathy does the rest. We never tried to train Michele at anything until she was almost 12 months old. We sort of had a go at this and that, but in reality we weren't serious about what we did. And mostly it was reactionary training. Then we got "trained" in the art of "training". We are starting early with Cathy. Already she will most times put her leg down when I tell her to. Now we are working on screeching. That is stopping her from doing it. It is really quite easy. The main requirement is patience on our part.
My 2 favourite parenting books are "The Continuum Concept" By Jean Leidloff and "To Train Up A Child" By Micheal Pearl. The later has acquired a bad name. But we have learned more about training from Micheal than from any other person or book. Micheal made us look at what we are doing and how we do it. There are other good parenting book out there but very few look at how the parent does what the parent does.
Enough for one day.
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