I am almost done with the Chinese translated copy of “How Teach Your Baby to Read” (《如何教宝宝阅读》). I skipped many sections as they are similar to what I have read in the teach math book. Almost wanted to put the book away, because I was quite irritated by what the editor (王宝星，not Doman) said in the preface. He said “现在已不是探讨是否「揠苗助长」、或怀疑「天才只有少数」的时候了，而是该担忧，过了三、五年后，如果每一个宝宝都成了超级天才，而我家的宝宝却不是，那该怎么办？” This is like threatening parents if they don’t teach their baby early, then their children will loose out. Every other kid will be a little genius, while their children will be the “simpleton”. And this fella is supposed to be some expert in early learning.

The teaching method for reading is identical to the teaching math method, flashing cards to babies at top speed, always introducing new materials, multiple short sessions etc. Babies are introduced noun first, especially those present in her surrounding, like people, fruits, furniture, animals, followed by verbs, then short phrases, sentences and finally books. Basically memory work.

Memory work, sounds dry and boring, how could it be fun to the kid? And are you sure the kid can remember? Well, I could remember most of the nursery rhythms and kiddy songs I learnt when I was young, but couldn’t remember the quotations from Macbeth or the important historical facts I tried to memorise painfully during my secondary school years. I have tried to memorised hundreds of Chinese poems during my high school years, but could only remember a few now. I am not buying the idea that the flash card method is fun though the author firmly thinks so. Though I believe memory work is vital in the initial stage of learning a language, I think there can be more enjoyable methods to disguise the memorising essence. Sing along or games will easily beat flash cards.

The book also addresses some of the parents’ worries.“太早学习阅读，对于一年级的课程不耐烦”, parents are worried that their early learners will be uninterested in the less challenging syallabus when they start school. To the author, this is entirely the problem of the teacher, or the education system, whom fail to excite the children, and is unable to cater to the needs of these “more knowledgeable” children. Well, there is definitely nothing wrong if the child happens to know more. It would be quite silly if we stop the child from learning to prevent the child from getting bored with the “less challenging” school work.

Another interesting point: parents are concerned that teaching young children too early is like robbing away their childhood,“让幼儿学习阅读，会剥夺他快乐的童年…..把宝宝关在婴儿床里，玩着不敢兴趣的玩具，或是任他声嘶力竭地叫闹，至少这样不会触电、割伤、打破东西、或是掉到窗子外面。这就是我们所谓宝贵的童年吗？” Again, he stressed that using the flash cards will provide endless happy learning experience to the baby, and also ensure bonding between the child and the parents. I am not sure if the flash cards sessions are really that thrilling, but certainly agree that putting the child in the cot or playpen or pram all the time is damaging. They really restrict their mobility and will probably kill their curiosity to explore.

Even if the kid is given a good head start, the other kids can easily catch up if they have a passion for learning, and they will be on par ultimately. As the Chinese saying goes小时了了，大未必佳, a good head start doesn’t guarantee a brighter future, the passion for learning still plays a bigger role. All parents wish for is that the kids be happy when they grow up, and too often, we associate happiness with academic achievements, thinking that it will ensure career success and a comfortable life.

Finally, almost finish reading “How To Teach Your Baby Math”. The author maintains that children, especially those between birth and four years, have unparalleled ability and desire for learning, but we adults have been keeping our children carefully isolated from it during this peak period of learning. He regrets that many adults only “keep the child clean, well fed, safe from the world about him and in a learning vacuum.” So since babies want to learn about everything, mathematics is something they want to learn too (babies are not choosy on what to learn), and to Glenn Doman, they can learn maths, and the younger they start, the easier it will be, and the better for their brains (more intelligent?).

Everybody agrees that tiny children are always curious and possess amazing learning abilities. But how does babies learn math? Thats where the “dots” come in, teaching babies concrete information instead of abstract ones. He states that adults insist on teaching children abstract symbols, that is numerals (eg: 1, 3, 4, 7) instead of the actual numbers (showing actual quantity of 7 dots instead of the symbol 7). By showing them dots, they will be learning the actual value of the numbers, and will discover the rules of mathematics like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

The basic math flash cards actually consists of 100 cards. Meaning 100 dots on the final card. The teacher will show the material to the kid very quickly, so as to capture his attention and interest. A session takes only a few minutes, maybe less then a minute at the initial stage. The kid typical goes through about 3 to 6 sessions a day. I am sceptically about children being able to distinguish a 77 dots card from a 73 dots card at lightning speed, but the author believes the kids can! That is almost phenomenal. Hmm…so, if it works, and the kid sees quantity (lets say 91 dots, or 91 cookies) while we adults see the symbol “91″ in our visualisation, would it remains that way when the kid grows up. Won’t it be awefully tedious and overwhelming if someone says 994184 to him, and 994184 cookies appear in his mind? Well, going to read about what else he has to say in “How To Teach Your Baby To Read”.

I am beginning to imagine training her to recognize quantity, and bringing her to some “quantity guessing” game to win some grand prizes, or to some illegal gambling stalls that operate “guess the number of reminder beans after division of four” game, I would probably win big! Haha.

Sometimes, I wonder if it is a mistake not to start training her to sleep on her own earlier. We wanted to start when she turned 6 months old, but I always thought letting her cry to sleep is a traumatic experience to the baby, and nursing her to sleep is so much easier and peaceful. I have heard of sleep training method like “ferberisation”, basically something like letting the baby cry to sleep with certain strategy. I believe we can always start later when everyone is ready.

Well, she has been sleeping on her back since birth and I always use two big bolsters to prevent her from rolling off our bed if she is on it alone. Pretty safe, because this little kiddo was never enthusiastic about rolling over. She would just cried and kicked her legs, waved her hands like an overturned beatle.

But since she started crawling, she discovered two other things simultaneously. She realised that she could get up by rolling onto her tummy, and sits up, or crawl somewhere. She also starts pulling herself to a standing position using the cot railing, my bed’s headboard and other furnitures. I have lowered the cot’s position (very bad for my back when picking her up) and can’t leave her alone on my bed anymore.

Thus, it is almost impossible to let her go to sleep herself now. I wanted to take my shower badly just now, but had five failed attempts of transferring her to the cot. She can be such a light sleeper sometimes. The moment I put her down onto the mattress, she opened her eyes, rolled over, sat up, hands on the railings, stood up and smiled at me. Arghh! She thought I was playing some games with her. If I didn’t move her back to the big bed again, she would just stood there, as long as I was within her sight. Sometimes, she cry standing until someone pitied her and picked her up. How to let her cry to sleep when she persist to stand there for an hour!

My little jailbird finally fell into deep sleep after torturing me for three hours.

I had a very bad case of sore toe at the moment. One of my toes got jammed under the toilet door last night, and it was quite badly hurt. My second toe is swollen with a very black nail. Blood clot under the nail, should have tried to remove or drain the blood out last night. I wonder if that little toe nail will drop off a few days later.

It was so painful last night, I could feel the pulsating sensation of hurt throbbing from the wound. I couldn’t sleep well, and when I finally got so tired and dozed off, the baby decided to wake up, got onto all fours, and started scratching the bed’s headboard. Sigh, have to settle her before being able to catch up on some sleep.

Wanted to take a panadol for pain relief, but was afraid that the medicine might cross over to my milk, so decided to tahan for the time being. When morning came, I found some cream to apply externally, really scared that my toe will start rotting and drop off…haha. Was looking for my bottle of Betadine to apply, but couldn’t remember where it was kept, too lazy to search.

Thankfully, my toe is still intact, no fungus growing yet, and the pain has more or less subsided, so I decided to hit the internet and do some researching on whether Panadol is safe for breastfeeding mothers or not. Panadol is supposed to be safe, but to my astonishment, Betadine is on the “not safe to take” list. Never would I thought this common lotion that can be easily found off the counter is such a big no no. Thank God I was lazy to look for it, else I don’t know what kind of harm it might cause.

update: I know nuts about medication, so the “iodide” mentioned in the list probably isn’t the common betadine solution for common wounds. don’t sue me ok.

One problem with a crawler around the house is that she is always hunting for bits and pieces on the floor. So far, some of the items she had found are: hair pins, scrapes of papers, tissues, sweet corn, rice. And guess what she found today? Onion skin! For all the items mentioned, we managed to seize them from her before they entered her mouth. God knows what other treasures she had found and feasted on!

“Don’t try to be busybody when I am serious at work!” I think this is the message yauyau was trying to convey to me when I tried to help her.

It happened twice yesterday. First was the envelope incident. I was going through the mails, and this little monkey was trying to reach out for them. I promptly gave her one of the envelopes to play with. I anticipated her licking it, but definitely not eating it! I snatched the envelope away from her and dug out some pieces from her mouth. She was furious! She kicked her legs, pushed away my hand and screamed! My mistake, I shouldn’t “robbed” her, should have distracted her first before getting rid of the envelope.

Later on, the toy episode took place. She was playing with the “twist and turn” toy. But to me, she wasn’t playing, she was only mouthing and chewing it.

“Aiyo baby, see, you can twist and turn it like this.” I took the toy from her and demonstrated it to her.

Mistake again, don’t ever robbed the baby. I didn’t learnt my earlier lesson. She protested and threw a huge tantrum. She was very angry and howled at me. I returned her the toy, but she pushed it away violently. She didn’t want it anymore! Gosh, what a bad temper! I think need to pay more attention to this aspect of her character before it goes out of hand.

My friend Annie has been raving about some flash card programme she is doing with her daughter Bernice and urges me to try it too. She started flashing card to Bernice (just turned 1 yr old last month) about 3 months ago. According to her, the results are brilliant. Bernice is able to understand quite a couple of instructions. She encourages me to give it a try again. This time, I caught the name of the programme, the famous Glenn Doman method.

I wasn’t interested with flashing cards to the kid, but Annie’s excitement and “endorsement” of it is making me curious. Time to do some research, it might be something worthwhile afterall. They call it The Gentle Revolution, which “proposes that tiny children have within them the capacity to learn virtually anything while they are tiny”. I did a searched with the National Library on its books, they are HOT! I was number 28 on the reserve list for “How to Teach Your Baby To Read”! Of course I canceled the reservation, it might take me 2 years before I could lay my hands on it. Luckily there are translated Chinese copies available, and I am only 2nd on the list. And I managed to get hold of an old tattered 1994 edition “How to Teach Your Baby Math”. I think parents are really very concerned about giving their kids a very very good head start nowadays.

I tried searching for this GD method on the web too, and discovered that this teaching method is not well researched upon. Though young kids has amazing learning potentials, I would like to know whether this basically “memorising” technique of learning words would have any adverse effect when the baby grow up. Will they be so accustomed with memorising that they are at a disadvantage at critical or analytical thinking skills? And I really want to know if children enjoy learning using this method. Flashcards seems boring to me.

Perhaps the more fundamental questions are: is there a need to get the kid ahead of everyone else? Are we being too obsessed about maximising the kid’s intelligence at the shortest time. Are we falling into the parenting trap of raising an intelligent child to boast our own ego?

Anyway, I will do some research on this.

Baby serious at work! Doesn’t she looks like a professional computer geek getting very serious with her stuff? Too bad, she could only bang on the keyboard (one of the keys came off) and left many finger prints on the screen.

The more I try to keep the keyboard away from her, the more she wants to gain access to it. Whenever I “flap” down the keyboard, she will crawl towards it and reaches her hand for it. I don’t want her to destroy the machine, neither do I want to douse her curiosity. So I guess the better solution is to satisfy her quest to play with it, and maybe she won’t be so attracted by it in future.

I am going to start a collection on old wives wisdom. Have been getting all these “well intended” advices from all sort of people, not necessary the old aunties only, some came from well educated, knowledgeable friends. Most of the advices are more like “warnings” to prevent misfortunes, some are silly, ignorant, incomprehensible and even dangerous. They scared me and make me paranoid. But of course, there are those which are really useful and clever.

They roughly fall into a few categories: pregnancy, confinement, breastfeeding, raising kids.

Here goes the first one which my mother-in-law advices on today:

#1: Do not offer your food to the baby.
The rational behind: If you always offer the food you are eating to your baby, it will slowly becomes a habit and the kid will habitually ask for the food the parents are eating. I kind of agrees with her. I definitely won’t want my daughter to become “tham jia” or “pai kuan” (I cracked my head and couldn’t find a suitable english word for this behaviour). I have encountered children and adults like that, irritating!

Alert for men. Be careful of breastfeeding babies, especially when they are hungry. Do not attempt to hug or cuddle their little heads near your chest, or risk being attack by those hungry ones. And don’t be like my father, play with the hungry baby topless. He was assaulted by his granddaughter. She saw his “breast”, and in a lightning speed, reached out for it and gave him a big squeeze and pinch.

These little fellas, they associate all nipples with milk, be it they belong to their mama or not.