It was a warm, lazy afternoon yesterday when I was playing an Xbox360 game on the television (child-friendly since it’s an anime-style RPG) while Catherine was sitting on the sofa, feeding Darius. After the feed, she placed him on the sofa in a sitting position, with his back leaning on the backrest of the sofa. We expected him to slant to one side pretty quickly, like what had happened previously when we tried to sit him up. Darius surprised us again by sitting sturdily and comfortably this time round:

However, after around 5 to 10 minutes later, he started to get upset, shown by his expressions and soft cry. We deduced that he was tired and carried him to his mattress to rest.

As much as we would want to provide more opportunities for him to sit up, we are also concerned if sitting up a baby too early in his life might affect his spinal development… Oh well, I guess occassional sitting up won’t be detrimental to his development right?

Yesterday being my off day due to a cover duty on Sunday, Catherine and I decided to go out for lunch at Causeway Point. After the meal, we went to Kiddy Palace and I bought a new toy for Darius — a set of linking loops:

At only S$5.90, this was a great bargain as it would be a good learning tool for Darius to build up his gripping skills. Just a day before, Darius was showing interests in gripping the flower’s handles (see Darius’ Discoveries about His Arms) and so we would like to provide him with even more opportunities to further explore his gripping reflexes.

After cleaning the loops, I hooked them up onto the gym playmat like this:

With the loops closer to the bottom, it will encourage Darius to reach out to these loops, feel them, and hopefully learn to grab/grip them. The flower was too high up for him and would require our assistance to pull it down first so he could reach it, so it was becoming a passive learning tool. These loops will change that.

With the help of these loops, the gym playmat now looks more colourful (though a bit cluttered) and attractive to Darius. Indeed, soon after placing him down on the mat, he began to get interested in these items before him and started hitting at them (we presumed he was trying to grab them but he wasn’t that good in eye-hand coordination yet ^^|).

With a little help initially to let him familiarise with the grip, he started to hold onto these loops and looking at what he had done:

Looks like these economically-priced loops are making a better learning tool than other expensive, sophisticated toys available in the market.

On another note, we have read that exercising and even crying would boost the baby’s lungs capacity, helping him build up his vocal abilities, since he would need more air intake to be able to make more audible and sophisticated sounds when he tries to speak.

It appears that these exercises we have started to provide him (i.e. hitting/grabbing the loops) have begun to build up his lungs too, as illustrated by his long breath while he tried to utter ‘words’ at us:

Also, he is beginning to vocalise newer and more sophisticated sounds at us, which we will participate by responding to him, thus further encouraging his use of speech:

We have been amazed by his improvement over these few days, and are therefore more motivated ourselves to spend more time interacting with him, and of course bringing him to his ‘gym’ more often for some ‘looping’ exercises.

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