Homeschooling Infants: Signing Time is Paying Off!

Most homeschoolers realize that children don't just learn between the hours of 8 and 3. Kids learn all day long. My daughter learns about history and geography at bedtime when I read to her from Little House On The Prairie. She might learn math at the grocery store. While we have formal learning, it doesn't stop there. Since I'm her sole teacher, if I can find ways to integrate learning in the rest of my daughter's day, I will.

The same is true for age. Kids don't start learning at 5 and know everything they need to know by the time they turn 18. They start learning at birth. In fact, they learn at a more rapid rate when they are younger.

Although my homeschooling efforts are currently focused on my daughter, I also have an 18 month old. As he gets older, I can do more "formal" learning with him. Not really formal because we don't have a curriculum that we use yet, but I can tell him what a train is, or a fish or a bird, and he'll pick that up from me.

I've been trying to teach my son sign language since he was about 3 months old. I wasn't expecting him to sign with me at 3 months, I just wanted him to start getting used to it. I haven't been the most consistent person in the world at it, but I kept on plugging away at it.

At around a year old, ds started picking up a few signs. He first signed dog, then he learned fish. He started signing milk and pointing to his mouth to tell me that he was hungry or thirsty (I just had to guess). It's very nice to have your baby be able to tell you what he wants.

Now he can tell me a lot more about what he wants or is thinking. Just today he made the sign for water (he doesn't do it correctly, but I know what he's trying to do) and I knew that he wanted something to drink. He will also make that sign when he sees a lake. We went for a walk and he heard an airplane, and made the sign for plane. Just a couple of days ago, he heard dd running the water in the bathtub to get her hair wet, and he made the sign for bath.

I have to thank the people at Signing Time for their great DVDs. They have catchy tunes and are made with children in mind. I'm glad that our library has them, although they tend to be a hot item and are often gone. Our local PBS station is now showing Signing Time on Sundays, so I have Tivo set to record it.

Dd has picked up on sign language too. She's getting pretty good at it. :)

How My Babies Got Their Names

And now, for something completely unrelated... a post about how my babies got their names (it's for a contest where you can win a $50 Amazon.com gift card).

My kids are named after characters in the Dragonlance books, written by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The characters are brave, good, kind, and are the kind of people that I would like them to grow up to be... mostly.

Their middle names come from my family and the Bible (the family names just happen to be in the Bible). My mother-in-law's name was used for my daughter's middle name, and my dad's middle name is my son's middle name now.

If we ever have another baby boy, we'll probably give him my Grandfather's middle name as the first name and find a Bible name for the middle name.

Both ds and dd do not have names in the top 1000 baby names, for any year, but I have actually met people that have these names before. They are obscure but nice. My grandfather's middle name is a lot more common, but it is quickly dropping out of the list of top 1000 baby names in favor of all the Jadens, Kaidens, and Aidens that are out there now.

So that's their story. If you would like to try to win the $50 Amazon.com gift card as well, you can go here and write your own story on your blog. Or if you don't want to try to win a $50 Amazon.com gift card but you have an interesting story about how you named your babies, you can leave a comment here... but I'm not giving away any prizes.

35 Years of Murder - Roe v. Wade

This morning as I was driving my daughter to the dentist, I heard on the radio that this is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I looked it up and it is the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision.

Back when the law was created, we didn't have all the fancy ultrasound machines that we do now. I suppose that the ignorance of the day could have been excused to some degree, but it's hard to look at today's ultrasound pictures and not think that a fetus is just as alive as a baby. I had the opportunity to go see Bodyworlds 3 last year, and they have a fetal display... it is amazing how defined a baby's features are even at 8 weeks gestation.

In the last 35 years, millions of people have been killed for various reasons. Some were raped, some were forced to by their parents, some had health problems, some didn't want to tell their parents. Whatever the reason, the way that we react to the preborn has changed over the years.

• A girl can choose to have an abortion, or she can choose to have an abortion and make the father pay child support. Over the years, the argument of father's rights has developed... why can't the father choose to renounce the rights to the baby and choose to not pay child support? We seem to think that it's "my body, my choice" but it doesn't extend to "my wallet, my choice" for the fathers. I'm against abortion, but it does seem a little unfair to the guys. If abortion wasn't available, as it used to be, there wouldn't be this argument.



• Adopting a baby is not an easy thing to do. If you want to adopt a healthy infant of the same race as you (and you happen to be white), you can get on a waiting list and hope and pray that you'll get your chance someday... after shelling out thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. I wasn't alive before the Roe v. Wade decision, but somehow I doubt that there was a dearth of healthy babies waiting to be adopted. When teen girls used to get pregnant, often they would go away to "visit an aunt" or something for several months, and come back after having the child and adopting it out.
  
  A lot of people that are in favor of abortion use the argument that "there are so many unwanted children in the world... abortion just keeps another unwanted baby from being born." While it's true that there are many unwanted children out there, most of them are not healthy newborns, which is what a lot of the parents facing infertility are trying to adopt. Many of them can't any more, because they can't afford it.
  
  Adoption nowadays just seems to be something that most people don't even really consider. You either want the baby and you have it, or you don't want the baby and you abort it. Not many people have the courage any more to go through with a pregnancy just to give it to some strangers that really want to have a child but can't.



• Premarital sex is something that is easier to hide from your parents. The availability of birth control aside, if you get pregnant nowadays, you can just "get rid of it" by going to Planned Parenthood, and your parents never have to know in many cases.



• Babies with birth defects (or suspected birth defects) are less likely to be born. You can have tests to screen them out. Sometimes the tests are wrong, but even if the test wasn't wrong, is it right to say that you don't want a baby to live even if it is not perfect?

There are truly cases where the mother's life is in danger and there is absolutely no way that the mother can survive without an abortion. Tubal pregnancies, for example. There is no way to save the baby's life, because the pregnancy in the fallopian tubes would cause both the mom and the baby to die. But there's not much controversy surrounding that.

Neither is there much controversy on doctors using abortion procedures, the D&C, D&E, or D&X, in cases where the baby has died and there is an inevitable miscarriage. Doctors that don't perform those procedures on living babies will perform them when the mother is waiting to miscarry. It can be a lifesaving procedure in these cases (without this procedure people sometimes could bleed to death)... I happen to be one person whose life was saved twice by this procedure, even though I was hoping that I could miscarry naturally.

There is also the abortion drug out there, RU-486, which was not available 35 years ago. It's not exactly the quick fix that some doctors would let you think... but then again, it is not necessarily an evil drug, for the same reason that the D&C procedure is not always used to kill babies. Sometimes people lose their babies and are going to miscarry anyway... this drug can be used to help people in those circumstances in the same way a D&C could.

It would be nice to live in a world where abortion was outlawed once again. I'm not suggesting that we have a "too bad, so sad" attitude towards those who find themselves pregnant with an unwanted baby, I think that we should help them in any way that we could. It would be nice if more resources were diverted to pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that would help teen moms (or older moms, if needed) with resources, medical care, or even a home to stay at if their parents kick them out of the house.

I really love my babies... the one that is 5 1/2 and had her first two baby teeth removed today, and the one that likes to climb on our computer cases (and anything else he can find). It's hard to believe that they started out smaller than a poppy seed. It's hard to believe that someone would want to end the life of a baby that would eventually grow into a sweet little newborn or toddler if just fed and cared for.

I used to think that abortion was okay for some people, but not for me. But then I saw the Silent Scream video. Don't click on the link if you are a kid or are squeamish, however (there's nothing on the main page that is offensive).

Hope that we don't have another 35 years (and 35 million babies) of abortion in this country. :-(

Drug Makers Take Infant Cold Medications Off The Shelves

My son has had a cold for more than a week now. A couple nights ago, he woke up at 2 AM hacking and unable to sleep. We didn't have any infant decongestant in the house, so my husband ran to Walgreen's to get him some medicine so he could get back to sleep.

Well, I'm glad that my son was sick earlier than this week than today, because who knows what infant medicine is left on the shelf? I found an AP article on Excite saying that drug companies had pulled many infant medications off the shelves. Evidently, some parents are overdosing their children.

While I don't run to the medicine cabinet every time my little boy has a runny nose, there are times when it's very nice to have infant medicine. Like when it's 2 AM and your baby can't sleep. By taking the infant medications off the shelves, parents are left with fewer options to deal with their children.

With the wonderful availability of the internet, it's very easy to look up a dosing chart for infant's medications. I like to use the one here. Although, since they are taking the medicines off the shelves, they might end up taking the dosing chart off the internet as well.

Which leads us to the bigger question: with infant medications no longer available, what will parents do when their child is sick in the middle of the night and can't sleep? My guess is that many of them will be giving their infants children's medicines. Which doesn't really fix what the drug makers are trying to solve in the first place, does it?

Newborns in Trash Cans And Toilets... Why Are We Outraged?

I just read another story about a baby giving birth to a newborn and trying to kill it. This lady tried to flush her baby down the toilet at a McDonald's restaurant.

You can find the story here.

I find stories like this to be really sad. If she didn't want the baby, why didn't she drop the baby off at a fire station or a hospital? That seems to be the mantra of so many people that hear about stories like this. The answer, my guess is, lies at the heart of the abortion debate...

She didn't drop her baby off at the fire station or hospital for the EXACT SAME reason why someone would have an abortion rather than put their baby up for adoption.

When you ask someone why they would have an abortion rather than put their baby up for adoption, sometimes they'll reply with "oh, there are so many unwanted babies in the world!" Then if you press it further, bringing up information about how the waiting list is so long for people that wish to adopt newborn babies, and that there are virtually NO unwanted, healthy newborn babies out there (and most handicapped newborn babies get adopted as well) they often have another answer. My guess is that it's the same answer as the people that flush their babies down the toilet or throw them in dumpsters...

"I don't know how I could live with myself knowing that my child was walking around and I didn't know what kind of life they were living!" Or something like that.

There are so many people that say that they could never put a baby up for adoption, and that seems to be a common answer. Why it is better that someone is dead than put up for adoption, I don't know. I don't get it. Especially nowadays... with open adoptions you can pick the parent of your child, send them Christmas cards, etc.

I never really noticed the parallel between people who abort their babies and those who throw them in the trash before... but it seems so clear to me now. So now, the only other part of the equation is... why are we outraged when someone tries to flush their baby down the toilet, but don't share the same outrage when someone aborts a baby?

Something to think about.

Really Sad

I was snooping around the Gerber web site, trying to find out where their products are made, and I came across some really depressing statistics:

• Soda is being served to infants as young as 7 months.
  
• Nearly 25% of children ages 19-24 months don't eat a single fruit or vegetable in a day
  
• French fries are the most commonly consumed vegetable for toddlers aged 15-24 months
  
• By 19-24 months, most children consume sweets, salty foods, or deserts at least once a day
  

Who feeds their kids like this? It was a study of nearly 3000 children, so I guess a lot of people do. I remember my cousin feeding her daughter soda in a bottle, but I always thought that was the exception rather than something normal. When my daughter was a baby, probably around 9 months old, she played with another little girl who was a few weeks younger than her that ate Cheetos, but again, I thought that was not normal.

I kept most sweets away from my baby daughter until she was a year old. She got cake for her birthday. My soon-to-be 8 month old son's desserts consist of Gerber's "Hawaiian Delight" or bananas, pears and apples. I thought most babies ate that way.

I know that toddlers can be picky, but no fruit or vegetables on an average day? Wow. My 8 month old gets fruit AND vegetables nearly every day. My 5 year old gets both almost every day as well... nearly every weekday I serve vegetables, she's always eating fruit and we can't keep it in the house long, and she's always asking for fruit juice.

Us grown-ups might have a hard time consuming good food, but at least we can say that our brains are done growing. When children are babies, their brains are growing at the fastest rate that they will in their entire lives. I just find it sad that so many people are not giving them a good start by feeding them fruits and vegetables, and keeping the sweets (especially soda) away.

I mean, how hard can it be to keep soda out of a 7 month old's diet? It's not like they're actually clamoring for the stuff at that age.