Education and Languages - January Update

In my Attachment and Discipline update, I began to discuss setting boundaries as a way of gentle discipline.  This brought to mind other areas of our daily life where I am setting boundaries for Natalia, but these fall more in line with education than relationships.  Baby-led weaning comes to mind.  Right off the bat I want to clarify that weaning here is used to mean the gradual addition of solid food and not the immediate replacement of breastmilk.  We have been doing our best to try to let Natalia set the pace for what she eats, when, and how.  We want her to develop a healthy relationship to food, one where she enjoys what she eats, learns to recognize her internal hunger and fullness signs, and practices independence to help build her confidence.

We are not the poster family for baby-led weaning by any means.  Sometimes, I am chasing Natalia around the house with a spoonfull of something, because it's the only way she'll eat any solids that day.  Other times, she's perfectly content to sit in her high chair and dig into her oatmeal with a spoon, or use her fork to feed herself some beans and pulled chicken.  Or she'll hand-feed herself cut up grapes and shredded cheese, or pieces of cooked carrot.

Learning to use chopsticks.

I've even started pouring a little water into her tiny cup so that she can start to practice drinking like a big girl.  She often wants to drink my water straight from my cup, instead of her water from her sippy cup.  Does all of this make a mess?  Absolutely, though not nearly as big as you've probably seen of the images of babies with spaghetti and sauce on their heads!  For starters, we try to intervene with foods that may stain, and feed her those while she's feeding herself something else.  We did this with pieces of beet at a restaurant the other day.  Also, while I'm happy to let her practice big-girl drinking with water, her favorite beverage - kefir - is served up by me on a spoon.  (I tried to let her go at it on her own, and a bath was in order afterwards!)

I have actually gotten so used to Natalia eating and drinking in this way that I was taken aback when our waitress the other day commented on it.  She saw Natalia eating a selection of foods - egg, bread, beet, cheese, beans, potato, carrot, chicken - and said "Oh, you're eating by yourself?  Good for you!" I suppose if this were a normal occurrence for a one-year-old, she wouldn't have felt the need to comment.

Another area of development where we think Natalia is ahead of the curve is in potty-learning.  (I prefer the term potty "learning" versus potty "training" because we are not "training" her to do a trick like we would with a dog!  She is learning the appropriate way to handle her waste; it's a skill like anything else.)  She was only a few weeks old when Alex first held her over the toilet and we rejoiced as she peed, seemingly on cue!  I quickly realized that she was indeed aware of the need to pee, at least while sleeping, because it would wake her up.  How do I know?  During a daytime nap, she woke up and I thought, let me see if she's dry, and she was.  So I took her to the toilet, gave her the cue sound we use ("pshhpshhpshh"), and she peed.  Then she went right back to sleep.

"You said, get on the potty."

At about four months old, we got her a potty of her own and started to sit her on it.  For the next six months, we prided ourselves for ever "catch" we would make in the potty - both pee and poop!  When Natalia was 10 months old, I noticed that she was staying dry all night when I'd wake up with her to sit her on the potty, but during the day it was more miss than hit.  I was exhausted from the constant getting up that I thought I'd avoid by sharing a bed. She started to resist being put on the potty, and so I stopped putting her on the potty at night, giving her a break.  A while later, I stopped trying to read her signs during the day as well, letting her go at her own pace.  Now and then, during a diaper change, we'd catch a pee, sometimes even a poop, into the potty, but I no longer made a big deal out of the misses.

A few weeks ago, at 13 months old, Natalia started to show an interest in her potty, which we left out next to her changing area all along.  We have a doll we give water to drink and she pees on her own little potty, and once I showed Natalia this, she was fascinated with it, asking to give her water so that she could see her pee.  She started putting her doll on the potty and then she started to climb on her own potty.  Pictures and video tell this much better than my description could, so I will let them do the talking. I will mention though that she now does the cue sound on her own, both when she's on the potty and when her dollies are on.  The only left to do now is to wait for her to be developmentally ready to recognize her urge to go early enough to catch it, and be able to utilize the right muscles to hold it long enough to be sat on the potty.

Another area of learning for Natalia has been linguistic.  I speak to her in Polish during the day.  Alex speaks to her in Spanish.  We speak to each other in English, and sometimes, usually when we're around a linguistically mixed group, we speak English to her as well.  In addition, we use whatever American Sign Language (ASL) signs we know at the same time that we're using the spoken words. The effect has been quite interesting.

Because of the multilingual input she's had since day one, we can't really answer questions like "how many words does she say" or "what was her first word" because it depends.  Most people, when asking this question, assume monolingualism and are referring to spoken words.  At 10 months old, Natalia was sitting in her play station while I was getting ready for us to go out.  I passed her when I noticed out of the corner of my eye what looked like an intentional gesture.  I stopped to look at her, and while making eye contact with me, she clearly did the sign for "milk", albeit with both hands.  I immediately showed my excitement and picked her up as we sat on the sofa to nurse.  Since that moment, she has signed whenever she wants to nurse.  She used both hands until about a month ago, when she finally dropped the extra hand.  Maybe she no longer feels the need to emphasize!

Natalia signs "milk", "bird", "dog", "ball", "water", "eat", "bear", "baby", "airplane", "cheese".  She shakes her head "no". She vocalizes "ahm" for "eat", "wowow" for "dog", "brrroom brroom" for "car" (vehicle, or machine). She recently started to make the cue sound we use for going on the potty ("pshhpshh"), but I haven't yet noticed if she does this to tell me she's wet, or just as part of what she knows we do when she (or her doll) is on the potty.  Finally, she has started to imitate some of what we're saying.  She's made the intonation for "baby" before, and for my father's name when my mom was calling him.  Most recently, she practices her letters (as daddy calls it) by repeating the vowels "a, e, i, o, u" when prompted.  She has also pointed to herself upon seeing her own photo on the computer screen.

These are all very exiting strides, and while we do have to be more patient than the parents of monolingual children, we are content and proud that she understands all three languages, as well as the ASL signs we use on a regular basis (when used without the oral translation).

Finally, Natalia is learning early literacy skills by "writing" as well as "reading":

Bedtime story corner.

For now, she's ambidextrous.