Count Your Baby’s Head-Lifts for Physical and Mental Exercise

One of the first things that your baby will need to learn to do is lift his or her head. This is an important skill because it allows the baby to visually explore the surroundings, and it provides crucial exercise for the baby’s undeveloped neck, arm, and chest muscles.

You can help your baby develop his or her muscles with a simple game that will provide physical and mental exercise. Here’s how to play the Head-Lift Game

Find a comfortable space on a carpet or mat. Put your baby on his or her chest and position his or her elbows and hands on the floor in a comfortable pushup position. Lie on your chest in front of the baby, facing the top of your baby’s head.

Call to your baby. The baby should push up, lift his or her head off of the floor, and face you. As soon as your baby lifts his or her head off of the floor, start counting enthusiastically. As soon as your baby’s head touches the floor again, stop counting.

Let your baby rest for a few seconds, and call your baby again. As soon as your baby lifts his or her head off of the floor again, restart the count at one.

Continue counting, stopping, and restarting in this manner. Eventually, your baby will recognize the speech patterns of your counting and will realize that the head-lifts are influencing your actions. This sense of influence will give your baby motivation, and your baby should begin trying to hold his or her head up longer each time you start a count just to see how high you will go.

Over several days, you will notice that your baby’s strength is increasing rapidly. Once your baby can hold his or her head up long enough for you to count to one hundred, you will know that your baby has gained some valuable neck and upper-body strength and has had a solid introduction to speech patterns and numbers. Best of all, your baby will have gained a sense of accomplishment and a lot of face time with an encouraging coach.

Sesame Beginnings DVDs for Babies and Toddlers

The makers of Sesame Street have gone into direct competition with Disney’s Baby Einstein line. Sesame Beginnings is Sesame Workshop’s new line for children six months to two years of age.

Several Sesame Beginnings books and toys are currently available; however, the Sesame Beginnings DVDs are bound to get the most attention. The new DVDs are intended to be viewed by parents with their children and are supposed to promote parent-child interaction through creative play.

The cast of the Sesame Beginnings videos features younger versions of Sesame Street favorites and their adult relatives. The major characters of the cast are Baby Elmo, Elmo’s dad, Baby Cookie Monster, Cookie Monster’s grandma, Baby Big Bird, Nani Bird, Prairie Dawn, and Prairie Dawn’s mom.

As of today, only two titles are available on DVD: Beginning Together and Make Music Together; however, more titles are expected to follow.

Object Permanence: Out of Sight, Not out of Mind

Object permanence, first studied by Jean Piaget, is the term for the concept that an object can continue to exist although it is not visible. All babies are born without object permanence. From a baby’s point of view, if something cannot be seen, it simply does not exist. As babies develop and experiment with the world around them, they begin to grasp the concept of object permanence. Generally, babies develop this understanding early in their first year.

Even though your baby will eventually learn object permanence on his or her own, you can help your baby with this process with some simple games.

Peek-a-boo is a very simple exercise for teaching object permanence. When you cover your face, your baby will believe that you do not exist. Once your face reappears, your baby will think you suddenly materialized. Peek-a-boo must be incredibly puzzling to a baby, but, eventually, the baby will figure out the secret to your magic act. After many instances of your disappearance and reappearance, your baby will finally realize that, even though you may not be visible, you still exist. Once your baby understands this, he or she has begun to grasp object permanence.

You can further build on this lesson by using a favorite toy and a blanket. Simply cover and uncover the toy with the blanket. After your baby has seen the toy disappear and reappear many times, he or she will figure out the secret. When your baby begins pulling at the blanket to reveal the covered toy, you will know that your baby has learned object permanence.

Baby Einstein DVDs Are a Brilliant Beginning

The Baby Einstein Company offers a library of developmental DVDs for babies. These DVDs are an excellent way to expose your baby to sound, color, and motion. (Click here to read about The Baby Einstein Company.)

In the second month, your baby should have just enough awareness to begin noticing the more basic Baby Einstein DVDs. Baby Mozart Music Festival is one of the more basic DVDs and seems to have a universal appeal among younger babies. To see if your baby is interested, put him or her in front of the television, play the Baby Mozart DVD, and watch your baby’s reaction. If your baby has a pleasant reaction, then he or she is ready. If your baby ignores the DVD or gets upset, he or she will need a few more weeks before watching the DVDs. Once your baby is showing interest in Baby Einstein DVDs, play them at will.

Your baby is likely to show a surprisingly high level of interest in the DVDs. Babies find these DVDs fascinating because they are specifically designed for their age group. The music is high-pitched and playful. The images are simple. The motions are easy to track. This is the perfect formula for capturing a baby’s attention.

The DVDs contain a variety of sounds and images that will help stimulate your baby’s brain. The on-screen motion will help the baby learn to focus and track with his or her eyes. The music will entertain and give the baby a broad assortment of sounds to help develop hearing.

There is one annoying thing about the most recent Baby Einstein DVDs. Since Disney took over the company, there has been a gradual push toward more advertising content on the DVDs. On some of the recent DVDs, the advertisements are pushed on the viewers. On some DVD players, you will not be able to skip over or fast-forward through commercials for Animal Kingdom, Little Einsteins, etc. The first few times you watch these advertisements, you might be a little interested; however, after you have seen them a dozen times, you will begin to get irritated. After a few months of seeing these advertisements, you will probably start having negative reactions to the material. Disney needs to rethink their policy of how they insert advertisements into their DVDs. Many people do not like to have advertisements inserted into DVDs they have purchased for personal use.

Even with the annoying advertisements on some of the recent titles, Baby Einstein DVDs are still a great tool for introducing babies to a world of sights and sounds. Your baby is bound to love the DVDs, and you will be amazed at how much of the information your baby will eventually absorb.

Tiny Love

Tiny Love is a company that produces developmental toys primarily for babies. They offer a nice selection of toys designed to fill specific developmental needs at specific growth stages.

Tiny Love is best known for its Gymini activity gyms and Symphony-in-Motion mobiles; however, they have a full line of products to aid in all of the developmental stages of the first year.