I couldn't get the book - I had limited funds and chose the reading and maths instead.

However, I think that once you've grasped Doman's ideas you can transfer the theory to anything you want to teach.

We did everything we could think of to make our boy strong and agile and it has paid off. He has a large hole in heart so we have to make sure he is fit and healthy and strong. Even if by some miracle he doesn't need the operation I want to set up good life habits so that his heart will still be strong when he's 40 so it doesn't come back to haunt him then.

You could only describe him as Physically superb. He's two and four months and riding a pedal bike like a champion, can't find things he can't climb and he can run and run and run.

This exercise can even help them build stronger respiratory systems and potentially help protect them from getting sick as often.

I don't know if it's all the physical stuff we do with him or maybe our more natural approach to germs and dirt or maybe a combination but our boy has had one cold in his entire life. We get sick and he doesn't. We just visited family interstate they were all sick and he just ploughed on through without so much as a sniffle (wish I could say the same for my husband and I).

The funny thing is the cold he got came when we were moving interstate and we moved seven times in four months. Part of me now thinks he got sick because of the stress and upheaval.

No child should have unguided and unchecked access to the internet and certainly shouldn't have access to your credit cards.

When children are smart it can be easy to think they can handle things.

But they are not wise. They are not worldly. They are not experienced. And they most definitely are not adults and should never be treated as such.

The internet can be as dangerous a place as the rest of the world. Protect your little one and her friends from herself. At the moment it's innocent online games, as far as you know, when does it move to innocent chat room? Remember you never know who is in those games with your children who is in contact with them. We should be more scared of letting our kids roam the internet world as we are with the natural world there are just as many threats there albeit of a different nature.

It is scary to me to think not only have you let your daughter roam the net world unattended but your little girl's friends' parents have done the same as well. Too many of us are too complacent when it comes to protecting our children.

I hope you have alerted your daughter's friends' parents to the little scheme they had going because they are obviously smart enough to work around their care givers once - they'll at least try it once again.

I would be more concerned about the excessive freedom your daughter has, her obvious disregard for the rules and her ringleading than about the screen time.

I hope you manage to get this under control before the hormones hit (and they hit earlier than you might think!)

PS there are exercises to improve eyesight and correct muscle weakness in the eye. You can google them easy enough. I'd be inclined to give them a go. My sister and I were prescribed glasses at the same time. She wore hers and just kept getting thicker prescriptions. I never wore mine and did exercises instead and my eyesight has not degraded and is in fact better. Though they don't always work as it depends on the problem it's worth investigating.

I think the encouragement of creativity needs to go a lot further than providing the materials for creative manipulation. It is the attitude towards your child's creativity that will encourage them to keep experimenting or to take the safe and known path.

Whether it's making up songs or drawing a picture, using modelling clay or creating a story, I believe the most important idea we can give children is that there is no right or wrong when it is your creation, it is not maths where the answer to 1+1 is always 2.

I think we need to make sure that they believe that we think their ideas are good ideas so that they will continue to be creative.

Humans are born creative naturally. We aren't born with preconceptions about what should be done with paint or modelling clay or a piano. But we are born with the desire to find out what we can do.

As long as this desire to experiment and try new things is encouraged children will maintain their natural creativeness and their natural desire to find out what will happen if I do this? The scientist in the toddler can't help but creatively wonder what will happen if.......

I hope that I can encourage my son to shape his thoughts and feelings with whatever materials I give him without a preconceived notion of what it should look like at the end before he has even started.

Sorry this post is a bit all over the place - I've been burning the candle at both ends and am less than coherent!!!

I have had students who have had this operation and also a nephew. They are all so much happier afterwards.

The thing is that if your son can only breathe through his mouth then he can't smell things, if he can't smell things then his sense of taste is, at best,  muted.

We are designed to breathe through our nose and there is a much healthier air cleaning process from nose to lungs than from mouth to lungs.

I have also heard reports from adults who have had the op that their energy levels doubled because they slept better and their mouth didn't dry out at night (which is really bad for your teeth).

Operations are very scary things and I hope that your son reacts to the treatment he is currently on and all goes well.

But if not take hope in the fact that it is a very routine operation and that your son will have a whole new lease on life afterwards. He wont know himself for all the new smells and tastes.

Best of luck , keep your chin up.

Our son has a funny sleeping habit. He currently has exactly nine and a half hours of sleep in a twenty four hour period. This can be broken down into many different schedules but it always amounts to the same amount. (We're  - in particular he is - much happier now that we're ignoring the supposed sleep specialists and letting his natural body rhythm take over).

If he naps in the day (for around two hours) he will go to bed at 1am and rise at 8:30. If he hasn't had his nap he will go to bed at around 11pm and get up at 8:30.

We don't force the nap issue if he needs it he has it, if he doesn't oh well no break for Mummy today!

We are lucky that are lifestyle can handle this but even so it gets exhausting.

At the moment my boy who is 2 and 4 months loves he following toys, no particular order just as they come to me

trampoline
sandpit
cars and floor mat with roads (old box flattened out, draw and paint roads etc)
balance boards
puzzles
things that come apart and go back together
bolts and screws (only under careful supervision)
shopping trolley
trains and tracks
pc games
little leaps (leap frog interactive dvd game)
books (as many different varieties and genres as I can get my hands on)
empty boxes (any size)
jar with a toy in it
carry pocket (large hand made pocket on a string that hangs over shoulder go out and collect bit and pieces you can do this outside or inside)
swings set
ride on car (they push themselves with their feet)
peddle bike
figurines (Schleich truly are worth the extra money and we find get played with more but in the end the 20 for $2 from the reject shop get their fair share of use too)
magnets
stickers (oh boy do we love stickers)
paint
playdough (so many different uses)
a couple of cups of cornflour (we usually dump it on the trampoline and let him drive cars through it etc and generally make a big mess then we just jump until it all comes out).
lego
blocks
musical instruments (any thing and everything that we can give him to experiment musically on - his personal favourite is his harmonica followed by drums and guitar but he loves them all)
Colouring and drawing (sometimes prefers blank paper sometimes likes to colour)
bits and pieces of junk

Animals (we don't have pets but we have cows on the property next to us and dogs, ducks, chooks and birds and wildlife everywhere and he has a good respect and relationship with all these - it is wonderful companionship)

We have two set ups in our house. Live tv it seems is a pre-parenthood luxury. It's also handy when we both have programs on that we want to tape.

You can get a digital set top box with a usb output that you can hook up to a hard drive. You can then replay them at your leisure fast forward ads etc you can also hook it up to your computer and edit it and burn it with the right software (heaps of open source free software). We got ours from Jaycar in Australia for $42 it came with everything except the hard drive (these range in price depending on how much you want to store you can use a simple usb memory stick if you don't need much storage).

Our other setup is a panasonic dvd recorder. Much nicer to use, same quality of picture but easier to edit, can burn straight from the machine and has a reasonable amount of storage (about 72 hours).

It's been great because we are quite fussy about what he watches and when he watches it. So this puts me in total control of what and when without having to worry about what's before it or after it or what happens to actually be on at the time it suits me to let him watch a program. Of course the big upside is that if he interrupts us on the rare occassion when we can sit down together to watch a program we can simply stop it and come back to it.

Great inventions!!

Hi Bella,

I am using the Samsung Color Xpression. I picked it up for just over $100 AUD

Quality is not top of range but prints good photo prints.

We then hopped on ebay and bought a chip ( you need someone who can solder it on to the right place for you and this will void your warranty) and we can now refill all our colours for $60 and that gets us about 2000 pages.

It is a sturdy little printer more than good enough quality for bits  etc.

Hope this is helpful

It is so easy to get caught up comparing the different methods of music education, it is so important and can bring such joy that we want to make sure we get it right.

I think we all have to remember that music is first and foremost a form of expression. There are techniques that will help your expressive vocabulary become more descriptive and versatile and responsive to the thoughts, feelings and concepts that you wish to communicate but these must be secondary.

I was recently on a tour with a band, we did 15 shows in 17 days. I hadn't worked with our guitarist before and am sad to say I did not enjoy the experience. A brilliant technician but his fingers could not have been more disconnected from his soul.

In limiting ourselves to teaching this style, or learning this method or reading at this age or theory first then play or even play then theory we limit the ability to learn. Music is an expressive art there is no right or wrong way of doing things there are simply many approaches to express your thoughts and feelings some people will like them some will not, some will understand you others will not even fathom the content.

It is not wrong to feel sad or happy yet you can play wrong notes so we begin to link an instrument of expression to certain correct ways of doing things. It is this binding of music into a tight little box of conformity that prevents us from experiencing it as a whole. Children should be exposed to as many different types of music as possible from all different cultures, styles and eras. They should be exposed to as many different sounds as we can as well and then be given the opportunity to take the sounds from their heads and hearts and bring them forth on an instrument - without our judgment of good or bad, tuneful or not tuneful. These things develop.

So many times older students have come to me because they cannot improvise. I have found that students who are not given enough improvisation and creative time on their instruments from the beginning of their tuition (and even better from early childhood) can get into a weird head space about intuitively playing even though they know the rules etc.

All my students experience a vast variety of methods of teaching tailored around a number of factors so that students can think of music in as many ways as they like. When we free them from the idea that there is a right and wrong we can allow ourselves to relax and we really begin to connect with our music.

While we are not all Mozarts it is a wonderful gift to give a human the ability to express through music without inhibition and conformity - I hope I can achieve this with my own son.

Hi All,

Good to know about other parents down under who are into early education. I'm from Second Valley (a little town south of Adelaide). But we're musos so we travel all over the place - currently on tour in Tweed Heads.

Looking forward to getting to know you all

Thanks ShenLi,

This is great!

Franca,
I have been looking for the DVD you mention Lyrical French and Lyrical german but got no results. Is there a page where i can get information about them?
Thanks.

Hi 2010BEBES,
http://www.littlehills.com/Language/Lyriclang.shtml

They are fantastic we have the French and German and we learned heaps and love them still, great buy great value for money

We started immediately with languages. We only speak English - at least that's all we spoke when my son was born, we now have a spattering of a whole bunch of languages. We aren't able to teach our son these languages ourselves as he is already well ahead of us but he loves watching us learn and I believe that it has set a good example for trying and failing and trying again.

We (and lovely family members) bought him cds of poetry and nursery rhymes in other languages, we bought the "Teach Me Tapes", we bought the Lyrical German and French DVDs, Leap Frog's Little Leaps console, IAHP picture dictionaries, wink to learn chinese (I only have two of these but they're brilliant and I intend to get the whole set when I can), Baby Genius DVDs, Sesame St from France.

I had read somewhere that at birth children easily differentiate between all the sounds in all languages but that as they get older they start to focus only on those used in languages they are exposed to. Eventually they find it difficult to differentiate subtle differences in vowel sounds etc. This is why we did so many we weren't actually interested in him learning the languages but rather maintaining the auditory ability for as long as possible. The only reason the languages were limited was because I couldn't afford to buy materials for more of them.

As we started to feel comfortable with what we knew from each language we would incorporate it into some of our other daily "lessons" we might be counting and count the objects in English then say that was English let's count in Japanese and count again. It makes repetitive games seem less repetitive. We also use his favourite movies as a way of introducing languages. Once he starts to get bored we just switch languages.

I know he understands a great deal in all the languages but I've no idea how much as I have no way of "testing"(which we don't do anyway). I have watched him follow instructions to new games in all of the languages. I have watched him get excited when words in other languages pop up in flash cards (particularly giraffe ).

He babble on sometimes in a mix of languages and the odd word jumps out to me and I can work out a small portion of what he's saying but I've no idea how much is real language and how much is gibberish.

Sometimes if I flash a word in another language he'll repeat it for me but usually he translates (I think he knows I don't understand )

I hope this is helpful

As long as you keep the sessions separated I don't think it will matter if you do them both on the same day. I just wouldn't be going for the same session. Though that can work too. Our son initially learned German from a set of songs that alternated lines between english and german. We all learned a lot.

Having said that he picked up reading Japanese much much faster and it was always done as a completely separate session with no Enlish included.

We do all his languages (English (native), Japanese, German, Chinese, French) every day and expose him to others (namely Spanish & Italian) consistently enough that he recognises words. We plan to introduce more shortly.

He adores learning languages and in fact if he gets bored with a movie (he's only allowed a very limited repertoire of films as they are so inappropriate) we switch the language on it and he becomes totally enthralled again - it's a great tool.

If you want your child to read each language equally I'd be going for doing the flash cards for both languages everyday.

Fantastic - will this have a monthly installment plan?