Playing with Your Baby
Floor exercises
Playing with Your Baby
Your baby will love it if you take some time to play games with her in your lap. You don't need to do much. She will find these simple exercises endlessly entertaining:
- Pull her up to sitting
- Pull her up to standing
- Hold her hands to help maintain her balance while standing (or sitting)
- Help her do deep knee bends and "jumping"
Just bouncing your baby up and down on your knee will no doubt delight her. In the coming months, she will enjoy nursery rhyme variations on bouncing. (You can find delightful bouncing rhymes in any good nursery book of rhymes or play rhymes. Ask your local children's librarian to point you in the right direction.) Start with a basic rhythmical bounce: "Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross." Then vary speeds with "This Is the Way the Gentleman Rides." Finally, you can move on to "Trot Along to Boston," with its surprise ending (opening up your legs and letting your baby "fall" through-but don't let go of her hands).
Give Your Baby the Floor
Q-tip
You can help your baby learn how to roll (if he hasn't already started on his own). When he's lying on his back on the floor, take a knee in your hand and cross it over the other knee. After you've helped him flip the bottom half of his body, all he needs to do is flip his hips and his shoulders will follow. Support his hips in your hands and then gently rock them back and forth until you've built enough "momentum" to flip him over onto his belly. Pretty soon, he won't even need you to get him started anymore.
Floor time gives your baby a chance to develop and practice new skills such as rolling over, getting on his hands and knees, and sitting up. Make sure that the floor or ground is soft enough so that he won't hurt himself when he plops down face first. Putting your baby down on a quilt or a thick blanket can soften a hard floor or tightly packed earth.
If it's warm enough (indoors or out), you can also start giving your baby a regular dose of naked time. By three or four months, your child will probably begin to enjoy the sensual experience of letting it all hang out. In addition to stimulating all of his senses, naked time also gives your baby total freedom of movement, unencumbered by one-piece outfits and bulky diapers.
When your baby can sit up by himself for more than a minute or so, try rolling a big, colorful ball to him. At first (assuming you have reasonably good aim), your baby's body will just stop the ball without any active intervention on his part. But before long, your child will start anticipating and reaching out to stop the ball with his hands. Encourage him to roll the ball back to you. When he does, you'll have a real game going.
Exercise equipment
Exercise Equipment
Babyproofing
Make sure that the strings or straps on the crib gym are no longer than six inches to prevent the risk of your baby's strangling. Once your child can sit up by herself, be sure to remove the crib gym. Otherwise, she might use it to boost her up and out of her crib.
At around four months, your baby will begin making good use of a cradle or crib gym. She will enjoy lying on her back and batting at or kicking, and later reaching out and grasping, the rings and bars that hang above her. By around six months, she may even grab rings or a bar and use it to pull her back off the ground.
Once she can sit up, your baby will also love swinging, now and for years to come. Outdoor swings and slides, whether found in a park, playground, or your own yard, provide hours of entertainment-and a little practice at shifting her weight on her bottom.
An automatic (wind-up or battery-operated) baby swing can also keep your baby entertained and is handy to have around. As an added bonus, many parents find that a baby swing can sometimes lull a baby to sleep when all else seems doomed to failure.
Babyproofing
Make sure the legs that support a baby swing are far enough from the swing that your baby won't get her hands caught. With a baby bouncer, make sure the hook or clamps that hold it up are secure. Finally, no matter how secure and happy your baby seems in her swing or bouncer, never, never leave her alone while she's up in the air.
A baby bouncer or jumper may also delight your child. The baby bouncer consists of a canvas seat attached to a door frame or ceiling hook by elastic cords. Your baby can dance and jump and spin in the baby bouncer; it also gives her a new, upright perspective from which to view her world.
Fun is the whole point of both of these pieces of equipment. If your child doesn't like them or tires of them, by all means take her out. If she loves them, then let her have as much fun as she wants, but be sure not to use the equipment so much that your baby has little or no opportunity to practice her motor skills while on the floor or in your lap. Although swings and bouncers provide plenty of movement, neither does much to exercise or develop your baby's skills.
Walker/Don't Walker
Babyproofing
Walkers are especially dangerous near stairs. So never put your baby in a walker if she has even the remotest access to a down staircase. Keep the basement door shut and locked. Use chairs, tables, or other furniture to block off your baby's access to all other down staircases. (A gate may give way to the combined weight of baby and walker.) Or better yet, whenever your baby's in a walker, keep her in a room (or rooms) with a closed door.
Like automatic baby swings and baby bouncers, a baby walker, which is a canvas or plastic baby seat set inside a table framework with a wheel at the base of each leg, does little to advance your baby's development of physical skills. Indeed, if your baby spends too much time in a walker, it may retard certain pre-crawling and pre-walking skills that he cannot practice while in the walker: getting on all fours, pulling himself up to a standing position, balancing, and falling safely.
If you make sure your baby gets adequate floor time in order to practice these skills, however, a walker-used safely and sparingly-may delight your child and expand his horizons. Like a swing or bouncer, a walker gives your baby a new, upright view of the world. Unlike a swing or bouncer, however, a walker enables your baby to get somewhere. He can move himself around by pushing his legs against the ground. (Of course, he will probably go backward for quite some time before he figures out how to move forward.)
The ability a walker gives a baby to move about is both the chief appeal of a walker and the chief danger. Every month, 2,000 infants in this country receive medical treatment for injuries sustained in walkers. So if you do let your baby use a walker, supervise him constantly. With the help of a walker, your baby can go a long way very quickly and reach many places where he probably shouldn't be. If you plan to use a walker, you'll need to babyproof everywhere in your home.
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