There is time to submit your name until tomorrow, 30 October 12:00 am (CET).
I’m giving away 10 free passes to my online course Understand Your Baby’s Thoughts – 5 Simple Signs that open the Door to Your Baby’s Mind.
You can still submit your name for the raffle, the draw will be Tuesday 30 October!
For more details on the course and the raffle, please click here. You can also submit your name on that page.
At seven months Briana started bringing her hands together in what resembled a clapping motion. She is now seven and a half months and happily clapping at any opportunity. She looks very proud about herself when she sees our encouraging reaction. We have been practicing clapping along to the German children’s song ‘Backe, backe Kuchen’. Now it seems that she wants me to sing the song when she claps, testing action and reaction.
Clapping just like waving hello and good bye are gestures that we naturally teach our children. Using signs when we communicate is simply taking this a good step further.
The clapping motion is a good preparation for symmetrical two handed signs such as the sings for ‘more’, ‘hurt’ and ‘ball’.
Bringing the hands together at the center of the body assists in mid-line alignment which is important for balance. This motion also promotes left (logical) and right (intuitive) brain hemispheres working together.
So what is Our Mamas Rock all about? It all started with my passion for helping parents teach their babies and toddlers to communicate long before they can speak and hence helping them enjoy all the associated benefits.
I started teaching live baby signing classes in 2009 and have since developed wonderful friendships with many of the mums who followed my courses. It is the heartwarming feedback and the smiles on the mums’ (and of course the babies’) faces that keep fueling my passion. Working with women who have recently become mums (with their first, second or third child) has been incredibly rewarding because I know I’m making a difference in their lives. I started receiving questions which were not necessarily related to signing just as I was looking for answers to baby related questions within the group of ‘my mums’. This made me even more aware of the need for community and mutual support when you are a new mum. We all want to be good mums and all to often we forget ourselves in the process.
This summer I realised that I cannot rock for my children if I don’t take care of myself. In fact I had hit rock bottom with my health. I had no energy and I was in so much pain, that I was not even able to sit on the floor and play with my kids. That was a serious wake-up call for me.
With only a few changes, including my diet, I turned things around: I can sit on the floor to play again, dance with Tristan and Briana at a family disco, roast marshmallows with Tristan, have the energy to go shopping, cook healthy meals and get work done when both kids are in bed.
In addition to helping mums understand what’s going on in their babies’ heads so that they can feel more confident and relaxed in their parenting I want to help with the challenge of self-care. After all, we can only rock for our children when we feel good in our skin. Since changing my diet has had such a major impact on me I will start with simple tips that are related to grocery shopping, cooking and nutrition. Watch out for the Our Mamas Rock newsletter. You can get on my mailing list by ordering my free eBook Precious Gift – 12 Good Reasons to Sign with My Baby, simply fill in your name and mail address in the boxes in the pink bar to the right. If you already have a copy of my book, you can subscribe to my list via my contact form.
I have been signing with Briana since she was about 4 months old and she has clearly been showing interest in my hands and fingers for a while. Today for the first time (at 6.5 months) she has been studying her hands very intensely. It was after her lunch and we had just practiced signs for ‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘more’ and ‘all done’. She was still sitting in her high chair so her hands were free to move. She kept looking at her hands as she was slowly moving them and her face seemed to say, ‘wow, is it really me moving these? How fascinating!’. It was wonderful to watch. She also sat unsupported for a good while today and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can’t wait for her to start using her hands to communicate with us.
My little daughter, Briana, is six months old now and she is so excited about being allowed to sit in her high chair. If it was her choice, she would have been in that chair much earlier :-). For me the chair came together with introducing solid foods to her. She is still a little wobbly but loves eating from a spoon and drinking from a cup. And I love the fact that she is facing me at meal times. This opens up a whole new possibility for signing with her and I have introduced the following meal time signs: eat, drink, more, all done. When she is not distracted by her brother, Tristan, she is fascinated with my hands. I’m soooo curious as to when she will start to sign back and what her first sign might be.
See Tristan signing ‘eat’, ‘more’, ‘all done’, ‘cracker’ and ‘down’
When Tristan was a baby he loved crackers. He loved them so much that he could master an approximation of the sign for ‘cracker’ and say the word at 12 months. One day, he desperately wanted to get up onto the sofa, signing and saying ‘up’ and getting frustrated about the fact that no one helped him up quickly enough. Finally on the sofa, he pointed to a plate with crackers on the coffee table followed by signing ‘eat’ and ‘cracker’.
I managed to get all of this on video. I put the camera down to give him a cracker so unfortunately you can not see the smile on his face when he had finally gotten what he really wanted.
Today my baby girl and I were lying on the sofa together, Briana sleeping on my chest. I closed my eyes for a while and let my mind drift. When I opened them again I found Briana’s little hand shaping a perfect ‘I love you’. Of course she had no way of knowing as she’s not even five months yet but it still gave me a wonderful feeling of connection.
Tristan, who will turn four in two weeks, and I still sign ‘I love you’ to each other for example when I drop him off at school and he is waiting in line with his class mates ready to go inside. It’s our secret language and he does not have to feel embarrassed about it :-). Last Sunday my husband drove Tristan to my parents in Germany and I waved them off as they were leaving in the car. I waved and signed ‘I love you’; he waved and signed ‘I love you’ too. Oh I just love these moments.
Diana and Tristan signing 'I love you'
My son, Tristan (3.5), has been exposed to letters and numbers regularly from when he was about 13 months old. Why is that? I teach the manual alphabet and numbers to the parents in my signing courses and they are repeated over and over again. The reason why I make the manual alphabet and the numbers a routine in my classes is that all of the signs I teach are based on a letter in the alphabet or a number. While I teach the parents, their children are also exposed to seeing the various hand shapes and hearing the letters and numbers as we sing the alphabet song and various nursery rhymes featuring numbers.
Before Tristan started going to a daycare centre at the age of 2.5, I always took him along when I was teaching baby signing. For a long time he was fascinated with the letters of the alphabet and he often asked me to sing the ABC song for him. At 2.5 he was able to sing the song himself in English (with his two primary languages being German and Dutch). A little later he developed a fascination for numbers. When reading him a bed time story, he was more interested in the page numbers than the story. For about a year now, he knows that during the weekend we don’t get up before the clock shows 8:00. When we call granny, I give Tristan the numbers and he dials.
Last week his granny taught him a game involving a regular dice, i.e. with dots indicating the numbers 1 to 6. It took Tristan only a few rounds of playing before he recognised the numbers without counting the dots. Every player starts with 8 wooden pegs. When I played with Tristan 2 days ago, he grabbed a handful of pegs for himself. I asked him how many pegs he had. He counted to 5. Then I said, ‘5, that’s right. How many do you still need?’. Without too much thinking, Tristan responded, ‘3’. I was speechless. During another round he gave me a handful of pegs and I counted 6. Again I asked Tristan, ‘How many do I still need?’ His answer: 2. No one had ever taught him to calculate. His little brain never seizes to amaze me.
Before he really got into numbers, he was fascinated by the alphabet. Watch him sing the ABC song at 2 years and 5 months.
2.5 year old singing the ABC song
