Three Years

I'm a lucky girl. I married a good man, and a great dad. 

Music

In my classes on child development, they taught that music was one of the ten necessities for normal development in toddlers. (Just in case you're curious the other nine are: stable relationships, touch, a safe environment, quality care, play, expressions of worth, reading, communication, and parental involvment). Music helps children learn through repetition, exposes them to their culture, and expresses the importance of creativity. 

I dunno if I believe all of that really. But, I love music--so sure, I include it in our normal routine. Oh, by the way--classical  music doesn't make you smarter. The actual study said that Mozart music helped college students perform better for a 15 minute window when performing spatial puzzles. Pregnancy headphones are the result of marketing and way-out-of-proportion media hype. So, whatever music makes lifts your spirit whether it be Beethoven or the Beatles--it really doesn't matter. 

I like to watch performances, so this list is basically my favorite music that also meets my baby video criteria: no flashing, and a minimum of camera shifts, i.e. visually understimulating, so that dinobaby can focus on the music itself. And I also look for short pieces. Dinobaby does have an impressive attention span, but he's still 9 months old. Two or three minutes at a time is ideal. 

Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens

• Each movement is supposed to illustrate a different animal and features a different instrument
• Elephants, swans, fish, Lions, etc. 
• Leopleuradon loves birds. So of course Voliere (The Aviary) is his favorite. It might also have something to do with the fact that children hear the upper register clearer than they hear lower tones. 

Little Prayer- Evelyn Glennie

• She's deaf, and has been since childhood--before she ever learned to play the Marimba. She talks about learning to hear without her ears, feeling the vibrations in the floor, off the wall. Cool.

Bach Suite on Mandolin by Chris Thile

• Dinobaby loves this. He just watches his fingers like he's being hypnotized.

Tiny Desk Concerts by NPR

• Really awesome music from all kinds of musicians: Iron and Wine, Bluegrass bands, classical violinists, Pheonix etc. 
• Since it's a radio show its all about the sound, no stupid backup dancers or choreography. 

Rabbit Days and Dumplings: East Asian Children's songs by Elena Moon Park

• I haven't bought this CD yet, but I probably will. Pretty cool music, without that really obnoxious tinny sound that usually defines children's music. 
• You can listen to five of the songs here. 

And the boy soprano I already talked about. 

Gender Roles

So I was just compiling music videos for an upcoming music for kids post and I was thinking about the message I hope they send to Dinobaby. Mom values music. Music is art, but it's also fun. It's gives expression to the divine and of the divine. And then I thought about the people inside of those videos--disabled musicians, children, women, Chinese, European, black, brown, etc.--and I was proud of the message they sent too. Music is for everyone.

I think its important that we expand the world that our children are born into. Culture likes to dictate roles and values, and usually that's not a good thing. Women can be smart and talented, but above all women should be sexy. Girls should play with pink or purple toys, and girls should love princesses. I'm sensitive to those because I'm a woman. But, now that I'm a mother of a son I feel all of the fences that are placed in his future too. And the fences are pretty blatant, they look like this: "I think he's gay" 

 Not that being labeled as homosexual is the worst thing in the world- it's not. But because of the principle implied.  Somehow your sexuality defines your interests and your profession. As a society we do it so casually and often but if we stopped for a second we'd realize how ludicrous it sounds. When was the last time you met a female CPA and assumed she was a lesbian? What if she's wearing a sports jersey? Yet, anytime a man notices something beautiful other than a woman we assume he's gay. So pretty early we teach boys to restrict their vocabulary to the basic 8 colors because if he mentions a specific shade he'll get picked on. We try to guide them towards interests that will make life easier for them because we love them. Nothing nefarious but soon all of the boys tried out for the football team and there's only five tenors in the choir (and all of the straight guys did both).  If a man sees an opera that he wasn't dragged to, it's assumed that the guy sitting next to him is probably his date. And that's a shame. Let's let boys be who they want to be without all of our messed up social pressures. 

So how does this relate to music videos? One of my favorites is of a 14 year old soprano from the Vienna Boys Choir singing the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute. It's spectacular.

1.  I love it because it shows that children are capable and remarkable just as they are--"Dinobaby, you don't have to wait to do amazing things. You can and do amazing things right now."  
2. "This is the Vienna Boys Choir-- it's full of little boys just like you that love to sing. They make beautiful music and the whole world listens to them." 
3. It's Mozart. ---"Isn't it cool how the music lets you know that he's angry and out-of-control even when we can't understand the words?"
4. He worked really hard to sing that. Video games are cool, but making something is cooler-- "I bet he spent a lot of time practicing. But I bet that he feels really good about how hard he worked and how well he did." 

And, although I have no idea. I bet that kid had a rough time being teased. At least he would've if he went to the same schools I did. And no, there's no reason to assume that he didn't grow up to be a heterosexual man.  In the history of the world most musicians, artists, chefs, authors, and  dress-makers have been straight guys. Only recently do we limit "guys" to safely masculine arenas of athletics, math and science.  I mean... to quote the wikipedia page of Franz Liszt: "Women fought over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they ripped to shreds as souvenirs." ...In terms of machismo, you can't get much better than that--and that's a guy who spent most of his time rigorously practicing piano. 

9 Months

being more kid and less baby everyday

Every month goes by fast but this one felt likeit was going  Mach 5. Perhaps it  because I got to spend almost all of it with family. Either way my little man is so gosh darn big now. I think he has more in common with his older toddler cousins than he does with the infant now.

Gross Motor: He is crawling! He can also sit up on his own (e.g. go from back to belly to sitting all on his own) and the busy kid has already mastered pulling up to standing. Crazy. While he might have been on the slow side to learn how to crawl I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if he was one of those 11 month old walkers. He eagerly walks across entire rooms if I hold his hands. 

Fine Motor: The pincer grasp gained more refinement and speed during the last month. He is also interested in matching up lids (even though he's really bad at it). And little man loves to touch everything--he leans forward like ET with his index finger stretched out when you're holding him trying to feel the fridge or an object on the counter. Also Dinobaby can get his pacifier into his mouth on his own, whoop! Although he  never does this when he actually needs a pacifier, by the time he gets to that point around I'll probably want to wean him off of one anyway. 

Social: Are there two phases for stranger anxiety? Seriously. He more or less came out of his first phase last month, but in the last week it's come back. Maybe it's not so much stranger anxiety as mommy clinginess since he's okay with other people but after a short while gets sad and wants me to hold him again. That's okay--I've got plenty of cuddles for him.  

Language: He babbles much more, definitively responds to his name, and really has no idea what I'm doing with the baby sign language. (Probably because I'm neither consistent nor particularly enthusiastic about it...whatever. He'll learn English- and that's pretty miraculous on its own.)

Personality: Although glimpses of his personality were certainly evident before now, as he gets older the differences between him and other babies seem less coincidental then they did before. For one, he ridiculously observant. He follows waitresses as they move around the restaurant as we eat. He loves to look at anything that you're holding in your hands. He's also a terrifically happy kid. Normal is defined by a smile. Yep, we love it.

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Upcoming is a post on music for babies, my thoughts on television, and  a multi-part series on cloth diapers---and since I was visiting family and actually used  store-bought baby food (and for a significant period of time) I'll probably also have an updated post on baby food since I now of grounds for making comparisons. Hopefully those will be up over the next month. Love y'all