hello!

happy back-to-school middle-Netherlands

Happy back-to-school Norway

morning

morning

Grenade shock 😮 dropped a glass cup on the floor, right next to my squirming baby! 😱 Nothing happened except wasted time and the loss of a great cup, fortunately. But that’s the second time in a week that I smash glass. Sleep deprivation showing its face?

Oh, and good morning 🙂

yikes @reefersleep

good that nothing bad happened

Yeah. Our boy has been blessed in that regard, so far. He scratched his knee last week at grandma’s, and has been talking about it ever since, much to the chagrin of caring grandma.

Doing the sign for “injured”, pointing at his knee and smiling while saying “mahmah” (“gramma”) . That’s one of his two words, the other being “vov vov” (“bow wow”). So, not a bad memory, more like a memorable event for him, it seems. Grandma feels bad about it, still.

I think he’s been sick twice or 3 times in his 1.5 years. Hope that trend will continue!

Ours falls like 2-3 times every day, so his elbows and knees are all red 😛 he has been running everywhere for the past couple of months

would be nice if he could remember how he gets hurt all the time, but he doesn’t seem to care 😛

hahaha thank God they’re so resilient. Our has hit his head countless times, usually the crying subsides within a minute, and he’s off again.

It’s kind of brilliant that the knees aren’t fully hardened until 2 years or whatever. Lots of sudden, instant kneeling that would be killer on my body!

yeah… we’ve been to the emergency room with him 3 times because he hit his head… twice because he passed out briefly :S

we call him the 🌪️

he is basically all over the place, runs immediately to the nearest climbable thing, climbs on top of it—and falls down occasionally

I took him to Fælledparken during our holiday and he just starts running to the other end of the field as soon as he hits the grass

Considering just leaving the bicycle helmet on permanently 😄

Morning lovely people

BTW, I can warmly recommend learning baby sign language for communicating with your non-verbal baby. We spent months signing at our kid with no response, which was a little discouraging - maybe we started too early. But, as it turns out, he does not speak yet, while other kids at his age can at least say a few things, so there was good reason for us to start practising using the signs. And now, he uses 74+ signs (I wrote them down and counted them!) for expressing his thoughts, which I think is amazing. We’d never know how much goes on (still don’t, really) inside his head if he couldn’t sign it. And I’m sure he’d be even more frustrated than he is already 😅

Is he hearing deficient is or this another parenting hack I didn't know about?

Nothing wrong with his hearing as far as I can tell, it’s very good actually (or at least better than ours 😉 )

i would love to learn and be able to sign, it looks really cool

We just thought it’d be a great idea to be able to communicate with him more clearly before he could speak, regardless of when that time would arrive. We read about it long before we had him. We witnessed his now cousin being very frustrated while unable to speak, and we have a strong suspicion that she’d have been considered much less of a hothead if she had a means of expressing herself.

We bought a book or two and followed some Danish accounts on Instagram. There are even better/more resources for English baby signing, naturally, and we actually borrowed a lot of signs from ASL. Built our own vocabulary 🙂

Hoping the signing will transcend the nonverbal phase and turn into a family language that we can continue using in the future (for fun, or the occasional practical non-verbal situation)

But you don’t have to make all that effort. Just using even a few standard signs can be greatly gratifying, I think.

Like “breastfeed”, “drink”, “eat”, “more”, “stop”, “thank you” and so on.

I am seeing sign language being used to communicate with babies more often nowadays (that's a cute baby btw). I didn't use it with my boys, I wish I knew about it then. Back to school you say?? Here there is no school until September 😪. Basically, it's the whole of July-August off, and they do the whole June and September only half a day. Not easy for working parents, I tell you that.

+1 to this parenting hack. We taught our daughter (and ourselves) a few baby signs, and it really helped. We mostly used "milk", "more", and "all done" (+ a couple more I'm sure I forgot) but those gave us months of fruitful communication. (We taught her another dozen or so word-signs, but they never saw much usage.) We started too early, too, but I think there's a long period where she understood and didn't reply back, which was still helpful.

That’s the thing. I think they are pretty much continuously understanding more than we think they do. Signing really is a hack to narrow the gap of understanding earlier on.

Though there are no guarantees 🙂 As always with children.

the ultimate mutable state: babies, lol