Month: March 2006

One of our jobs as parents is to provide interesting and educational stimulation for Leilani while she is awake. Music and singing only work when she is sleepy, but Mommy has found that rhyming stories really get her attention. She also looks at pictures in books, so we can read to her and she will sit through an entire book. This is very lucky for us, because with all the rain recently, we cannot go outside much, which is her preferred stimulation.

On a recent rainy day, one of many, Mommy picked out the Dr. Seuss classic book, “The Cat in the Hat“, which coincidentally, is about staying inside on a rainy day:

Leilani’s mom adds – much later: And that’s what I do on a rainy night – play with photoloops

We had heard that new parents should never plan to eat a meal at a set time, or plan to eat together. While that was sometimes the case, Leilani lets us eat together most of the time. At first, we put her in a swing next to our table, and we would eat while she slept. For a while, she could be awake and watch us eat while she watched her mobile or the ceiling fan.

But recently, seeing the parents put things into their mouthes is too interesting for her to watch and she wants more attention. Half of the time, it makes her hungry, and Mommy can feed her at the table while we eat. The rest of the time, she just wants to sit on our laps and watch us eat. It’s hard to eat over a baby, so we’ve had to put napkins on top of her when we eat messy foods:

To be fair, Mommy spilled food in this photo because she was laughing so much while I was taking the picture.

This seems to be a month of firsts. Leilani is definitely more interested in the world around her, and motivated to interact with it. After talking practice, she’s experimenting with crawling:

This was taken on Thursday, March 9th, it was the first time she got up on her elbows by herself. In this picture, her feet are also in the air, but when she put them down, she tried moving her knees up in a crawling motion. So she is not crawling yet, but we can see she knows how to do it and really wants to try.

They didn’t take any footprints of Leilani at the hospital, so we bought a non-toxic ink-pad to do it ourselves. We tried in the first weeks, but her feet move too much to make prints, even in her sleep. We tried again last month, and I just scanned them. It was a total coincidence that the multi-colored ink-pad matches the blog colors.

This was made on February 17th while she was sleeping, but they weren’t much bigger than the first ones we tried to make. This is NOT actual size, you will probably see them much larger than in reality, depending on your screen resolution:

We had quite a surprise on Wednesday after I fixed the videos in the original post. We were both at our computers, and Leilani was in the office with us, in her bouncy chair away from the computers. I asked S to test a video and when the video played, Leilani could hear herself through the speakers.

What happened next seems incredible to us as new parents: after a few seconds, Leilani looked up and started talking to her recorded voice! She used the same sounds, almost in exactly the same order as in the video. After all the times we try to make ohhh and ahhh sounds that she rarely reacts to, it seems like she was saying: “That’s exactly what I was saying before, finally someone who can understand me.”

We played the video a few times and she practiced the sounds with herself for about 5 minutes again. We tried playing it the following days, but she wasn’t in the same mood and repeated only one or two sounds.

So not only is Leilani trying or practicing to speak, she also understands (not just hears) voices, her own in particular.