Studio3Music Blog

Posts Tagged ‘parenting’

Dec
13

The Wonder Weeks – or How I stopped trying to do what all the parenting books told me to do.

I’m a new mom. My hubby and I had our first baby this August and officially made our family of 2 into a family of 3 (excluding pets, of course). With that being said, we had no idea and still have no idea what in the world we are doing!

People have recommended books galore for us to read, Baby Wise, The Baby Whisperer, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, Happiest Baby On The Block and the list goes on. Being the new mom that I am, I figured that I should start reading up on some of these so I can know what I’m doing, right?

Newborn Miles (before the fussies start)

Well, I remember my second day alone with Miles and my mom had said she was headed over to help and hang out. As soon as she opened the door to our apartment, I burst into tears! It had been an awful day the day before and a really tough night. I was so ready for some reinforcements by the dawn’s early light!

While being able to process out loud some of my thoughts, I realized that I was carrying a ton of weight on my shoulders about how Miles should conduct his days and nights. All of these books were telling me how to do things and I was thought that I was gleaning from all of them. I would read a book and then try to put into practice what they had ‘suggested’.

Finally, I realized that my sweet baby boy did not fit into any book! He is his own little person and he has to figure out a schedule of his own. His tummy will tell him when he is hungry and his eyes will tell him when he is tired. And as for being a mom, I had to trust my instincts and listen to my baby. So, I returned all the books to the various friends and libraries and set out on my own to figure this new thing out!

With all of this new information being thrown my way, I did retain some. One book, however, I pick up and read as Miles grows. This book is called The Wonder Weeks. I have to say, this book is such a lifesaver to me! If anything, this book gives me peace of mind that whenever I couldn’t and can’t figure out what is going on with my new little one, he is more than likely growing. And with that, comes a whole bunch of changes in behavioral patterns.

This book covers the 10 fussiest phases in a baby’s first year and a half. Through these fussy phases come wonderful leaps forward in a baby’s development. He learns new skills through these fussy times and is proud to show them when they are through the storm.

If anything, this book taught me to let go of having control. To know that if Miles is in a proven ‘fussy time’, that his normal day to day patterns might be a little off. So if he wants to eat every 2 hours and sleep for 4, it’s ok. If he is staying awake for 3 hours at a time, it’s ok. If he is crying and clinging to me, it’s ok (even if I’m totally annoyed with this!).

-posted by Miss Anna, who will tell you the rest of the story (aka “magical leaps forward”) tomorrow.

Tags: babies, books, Miss Anna, parenting, physical development

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Dec
7

Advent Calendar Anticipation

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Family, Things to do

Children love surprises! So when a sheet of colorful cardboard has 24 enticing little doors with a surprise tucked behind each one, what child can resist? Add a piece of yummy candy behind each opening and kids go nuts. No wonder Advent calendars have been around for a couple of centuries.

The celebration of Advent dates back to the 4^th century. Converts to Christianity observed Advent as a season of preparation for baptism. In the Middle Ages, Advent was a time to look forward to the 2^nd coming of Christ. The traditional observance of Advent still celebrated today involves the anticipation of the nativity. By lighting a candle on each of the four Sundays leading up to Christmas day, Christians prepare to celebrate his birth on Christmas day. While many people still celebrate the religious aspects of Advent, the use of Advent calendars has become part of the secular observance of Christmas too.

The earliest Advent calendars probably originated in Germany. German Lutherans in the 19^th century would draw chalk lines on their doors to help children count down the days until Christmas. Lighting 24 candles was another common practice.

The first handmade Advent calendars began in Hamburg, Germany. Soon, a printer in Munich named Gerhard Lang created the standard Advent calendar still recognizable today. He glued 24 little colored pictures to cardboard and then attached another piece of cardboard with 24 matching doors on top. His company, Reichheld Lang Printing Co. marketed 30 designs. In 1930, they were forced to close when cardboard was rationed during WWII.

After the war, Richard Sellmer Verlag of Stuttgart, Germany, began to print the calendars again. Today, this enduring company continues to carry a stock of 1,000 calendars.

Advent calendars come in a variety of styles ranging from inexpensive traditional designs, to more expensive 3D Lego versions and everything in between! Handmade Advent calendars are a popular craft this time of year. Just google “Homemade Advent Calendars” and you’ll find many easy –to-make ideas.

A 1946 newspaper article showed President Eisenhower’s grandchildren gleefully opening up doors on a “Little Town Advent Calendar.” Subsequently, the popularity of these calendars soared in the US. Of course. Advent calendars capture children’s anticipatory nature the world over.

Click on this link for more information on the history of Advent and the Advent calendar.

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who remembers how excited she was each morning to discover what tiny picture of a toy was behind the numbered door on her Advent calendar!

Tags: Donna Detweiler, Holidays, parenting, Things to do

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Nov
4

Sharks Love Music, Too

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Child Development

My son Jude should have been a shark for Halloween. He, like a shark, cannot stay in one place for longer than 5 seconds at a time. He is constantly moving. As a mother of two, Giana (5) and Jude (2) I have to say, my boy has taken me to a whole new level of parenting… and fitness.

When I started teaching for Studio3 I was pregnant with my son. I have always had sharks in my class, both boys and girls (there is no gender bias for being a shark). I saw caregivers running after them, fretting that they were not participating in class. I always told them the same thing, “Let them move. They are learning what they need to learn, how they need to learn.”

I also pontificated about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. I had devoted a good portion of my thesis in graduate school to his theory that human beings have nine different kinds of intelligence reflecting different ways of interacting with the world. This results in the need for different modalities of learning. I assured them that their children are kinesthetic learners who need to move to absorb information. It was easy for me to say. I had seen it in my classroom for years while teaching other people’s children. It wasn’t my child. I couldn’t empathize. Then, Jude came along…

At first, he was his sweet little baby self in Village with Miss Allison. Cooing, drooling, clapping on command, essentially the most darling baby on the planet, right? As a shark, Jude never walked. He crawled and then started running. I couldn’t believe how quickly those little legs could go. I would be sweating bullets just making sure he didn’t launch himself off of our front porch.

We moved him up to Our Time around 17 months. He knew Miss Allison, he LOVED Miss Allison and yet his shark-like qualities could not be reined in by Miss Allison. The other children would be circle dancing their tushies off and Jude would be climbing the cubbies. The other children would dance beautifully with the scarves, while Jude would be opening and closing file cabinets. I felt like he was being disruptive. Why was I bringing him to a class where he wasn’t participating? Was this for him or me?

About the second or third week into Our Time, something very strange happened. We were in the kitchen and Jude started singing. He’s always been super musical, so this wasn’t surprising, but then he started to do something with his hands. He was singing and dancing “Liza Jane”!

As the weeks continued Jude kept showing us what he learned when we got home. He would take sticks and sing the hello song. He would drum and sing “Aiken Drum” with the freeze on the word moon. I wanted to cry with joy (in fact I think I did a couple of times). It was working! My advice worked for my kid too! I felt validated. Dang, I’m smart!

Now my little shark is two. He’s a mover, a shaker and an Our Timer. He still moves around while Miss Allison is teaching, but I know he is learning what he needs to learn, how he needs to learn. Parents of sharks, unite and surrender! Let them move and they will show you what they learn.

-posted by Miss Steph, momma to one shark with ants in his pants who likes to dance.

Tags: kindermusik, Miss Steph, music, parenting

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Oct
13

Brain Rules: Every Brain is Wired Differently!

Posted in Child Development, parenting

By the time I finished reading this chapter of John Medina’s interesting science-for-dummies book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, I was scribbling notes frantically and reading quotes to my twelve-year-old son who was with me at Starbucks. I’m slightly suspicious that my decaf mocha wasn’t really decaf, nonetheless, it was one of my favorite chapters in the book. It has so many implications for educating our children with finesse and gives hope for greater success.

The chapter on how our brains become wired is mind blowing. That’s a bad pun, but it’s true! As learning takes place, neural connections blow apart, or split, creating new connections. Like a highway system continually under construction, more learning equals more complex neural connections crisscrossing the brain. More is good! Medina points out interesting research done on the brains of violin performers for example. Their brains resembled Seattle’s Spaghetti Bowl (For you non-Seattle readers, it is a complex section of highway on and off ramps south of town.)

It all starts at infancy, when the brain is hyper-developing. A three-year-old’s brain has two to three times the neural connections in specific regions. But he doesn’t get to keep them. Interestingly, by the time the child reaches eight, his brain development is “pruned” and back to normal. Then in puberty, another phase of frenetic neural growth happens until age 18 is reached. Doesn’t that explain a lot!

Just as kids come in all shapes and sizes in spite of age, Medina is quick to point out that brains develop as uniquely as bodies. Early and late bloomers are encompassed in “normal,” even with respect to the brain. However, what we learn creates a unique neural configuration. So our brains are customized based on our experiences, like the violin player’s. The modern science of brain mapping, where scientists can track the neurons firing (called “lighting up”), showed that even twins have individualized brains because of their unique responses to similar events.

Messy World of Brain Development

Every brain learns differently, concludes Medina and other brain researchers. One neurosurgeon, Howard Gardner, wrote a book about his findings. Called Frames of Mind; the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Gardner suggests other intelligences besides the old IQ measurement exist. His list includes: Verbal/linguistic, musical/rhythmic, logical/math, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal/intrapersonal, and nature. Logically, different brain configurations would equal different skill sets. Brain surgeon, George Ojemann, maps brains and then does surgery to allow epileptic patients to get relief from seizures. As he stimulates different regions of the brain to find the trouble areas, he has observed that no universal regions for specific functions exist in the brain. That means that approximately 7 billion unique brains inhabit planet earth today.

Brain research merely reveals something we parents and teachers already know. There are no two kids under our roofs, in our classrooms, or in our neighborhoods that are exactly alike. And as we pour our hearts into educating our kids to the best of our abilities, it is a very inexact science. Medina concludes that exact thing: “The ability to understand the interior motivations of someone else and the ability to construct a predictable theory of how their mind works based on that knowledge” is what is needed to help students learn. We need to be students of our students! And that takes time and proximity. As we live and work with our kids, experience will help us discern the best ways for “teaching to be transformed into learning.”

Remember my failed experience teaching my daughter about Johnny Appleseed? What I’ve learned about brain wiring tells me that it’s ok that my kid’s learning process is messy. My daughter’s singular after-class memory of “Jerry Somebody” provides clues into how her brain works. As I continue to observe how she learns best, it will lead to more insights and a better learning experience. My expectations are shifting as I understand there are no teaching formulas. Finesse and success will come with experience. And that’s what has given me an excitement equaling a coffee buzz!

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who finds the uniqueness of brains both exhilarating and exasperating!

Tags: brain, Donna Detweiler, learning, parenting, science

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Sep
7

In Celebration of Messy

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Family, parenting

Messy is underrated. I recently heard of a movement of mothers who are trying to make messy the new “in.” I like that idea. It goes along better with the Law of Entropy: My house moves naturally toward messy without any help from me. When neat is the goal, I have to put some scrub to the tub, so to speak.

When I heard about this messy movement, it captured my attention. Are my standards too high I wondered? Am I bowing to the gods of neatness when my time could be better spent elsewhere? Mind you, we’re not talking about dishes left in the sink for days, or filthy bathrooms. We’re talking about how picked up and beautiful we feel our house should look all the time. You know that fleeting ideal– how the house looks when there are no people in it. When the cleaning lady (me) has finished and no one is home yet, or before the guests arrive for our child’s birthday party with its festive table setting.

When I heard of the messy movement, I immediately thought of a few friends who I’ve always admired for their toleration of mess—no kidding! There’s Caroline (name changed just in case she doesn’t yet see being messy as an admirable trait.) When you enter her house, you notice that her main living room has a large pop-up princess fort and one of those crawling tunnels. The Little Tykes kitchen is in the corner with the cookware and fake food strewn around. Living in a chilly, rainy climate, these toys provide an indoor large motor play place for her children. Because the living room has the most space, they use it for what their family needs most in this phase of life. On the occasions that grown-ups are over, the stuff gets moved, but on a daily basis, the living room is play central. That practical attitude gets a messy award!

Another friend of mine has a messy art table by their front door (which I blogged about earlier this year). No hiding away this messy space in shame. Art projects are not interrupted prematurely by a need to clean. Once in a while pens and paint jars are capped, but not before some have dried to a crust. Piles of paper grace the floor and scissors, crayons and glue cover the table top. A true messy haven for a budding artist, who paints and draws for hours each day I’m told.

The point of the messy movement, I would guess, is not mess for its own sake. It’s a reaction to a perfectionistic mentality. When we have an unhealthy ideal of what our home should look like, we can be so driven to achieve this unrealistic goal that we drive ourselves and our families crazy. We aren’t having any fun and neither is anybody else as we chase this illusion of a perfect home.

Parents, I have a proclamation for us: Family life is messy. Seems to me the messy movement is all about bringing balance to our lives. There’s a time to clean and a time to be messy. When our children are young, it is the time to be messy. Celebrating messy is part of celebrating kids. So let’s spend a bit less time restacking the Tupperware they’ve thrown into the cupboard (or whatever our neatness obsession is), and more time taking our kids out to the garden to play. Afterwards we can cut some beautiful flowers to put in a vase for the kitchen table. We can clear a space for it in the middle.

-posted by Donna Detweiler who hears there’s plenty of time to have a clean house (and be lonely and wish it were messy again) after the kids are gone.