I've just bookmarked the site. Thanks for sharing!

I'll have to check a lot of those out!

A comment on the 1,2,3 thing. I haven't read the book, but I observe many parents using it successfully with their kids. So I tried it with my 3 year old. His response?

"No, Mommy, count to 100!"

"I'm not going to count to 100!"

"It's okay, Mommy. I'll help you!"

I'm not a natural linguist, as I failed to even learn Mandarin, which is my parents' native language. My high school French was far more easily learned, being much more like English.

I was impressed when I was in Cameroon, West Africa, how many people spoke multiple languages, because there were so many languages in that tiny country. Even then, sometimes we had to have multiple translators to take a history from a patient--as many as 5 bridging the gap. Talk about room for translation error!

A thought about learning computer languages--do they change so that what you may teach them now may be obsolete by the time they can use it? I remember when I was in 7th grade, our school system made us learn BASIC. Not truly helpful for most of us. However my 10th grade typing class was probably the most useful class I ever took in school.

I liked the book Le Petit Appetit by Lisa Barnes. Their website has other tips, too. http://www.petitappetit.com/

I also found http://www.amazon.com/Super-Baby-Food-Ruth-Yaron/dp/0965260313 to be helpful, but occasionally annoying. The author can get a little preachy and off topic, and she does tend to make claims that are only substantiated by the anecdotal evidence of her own family.

I second the stick blender recommendation. I didn't have one when my baby was on purees, but I wish I did! It makes it so easy to make a small pureed portion of whatever your family is eating that meal, as long as the types of food are developmentally and nutritiously appropriate. Clean up is so much less complicated, as well.

I make my own yogurt, and we have smoothies all the time, thanks to the stick blender. You might consider making yogurt from breast milk when it's time to start solids, although I haven't done that myself (my supply was too low for culinary experimentation).

As for teething, we had a knotty doll similar to this made from organic terry.

http://sewingmamas.com/b/downloads.php?do=file&id=68

It wore well through the first year, going through the wash at least weekly, but then began to look grungy, so I made my son a new one. He chewed on it thoughtfully, then handed it back to me, and demanded his old doll back. The old doll is positively tattered now, but even at age 3, it remains among his beloved bedmates. The new knotty doll got adopted as a buddy when he was no longer teething, so it still looks pretty good.

My recommendation on teething tablets is to make sure you research every ingredient in it, as you are giving it to a baby (obviously). Herbs are not inherently safe just because they are natural (cocaine, marijuana, and tobacco are natural as well). And just because they are designed for babies doesn't mean that they are necessarily "safe" either. An overdose of Oragel can be fatal.

I suppose another way you would know would be if your child consistently sang a particular song in the same key that he or she heard it played, when it had been hours or days since she had heard it. For instance, if she is singing the theme of her favorite TV show in the right key when she hasn't watched in a few days, that would be a pretty good sign, I would think.

I would imagine that the child would have to be old enough to learn the names of the notes and to communicate them back to the tester. There are hearing tests for preverbal babies, but they just rely on demonstrating that the brain is stimulated when a sound is played.

KL,

It sounds like you have a very good sense of relative pitch if the group sliding flat drives you nuts. I can totally relate to that.

I should have clarified about singing in another key. I hate singing in church in a different key from what is printed in the hymnal or the bulletin if I don't know the song. Then I have to sight read AND transpose, and it's just another step that takes my mind off the words of the song, and I have no idea what I'm even singing until I've got the melody down, which is by verse 3 or 4. Also, if I know that the hymnal has the song printed in a certain key, and the pianist is transposing it up a step or two, and everyone is shrieking to reach the high notes, then I think she would have been better off leaving it in the original key.

I may have been born with perfect pitch. My sister and I both started piano young (around age 4), but I have it and she doesn't. My parents probably don't even know I have it. I'm sure they didn't train it. My piano teacher decided to test all her students when I was in grade school, and she found out I had it. She was the one who told me what it was, but didn't make a huge deal out of it.

As for singing a tone on command, I think that is really hard, because tones are in a continuum, like a spectrum. So nailing the exact frequency is really tough. If someone told you to go to the store and buy the olive shirt that matched her skirt, and told you the brand and design collection, it would be easy. But if you had to find the shirt without that information, and there were all sorts of shirts that could be called olive, it would be hard to find that exact shade just from memory. Or even harder, mix up your own olive using a color palette.

We did a sort of low key Elimination Communication with my son, starting around 8 months (Baby Bjorn Little Potty), but it was hard because he was in daycare 3 days a week (hence, the low key). We were pretty successful for 2 months, until he decided he wanted no part of the potty chair anymore. He was in cloth diapers at home, and paper at daycare (official policy, and all that).

At 13 months, when he could toddle, we found out that he would stand and pee in a urinal (milk jug cut out and suction cupped to the side of the bathtub), and his control was good enough by 17 months that he could stop his stream, fish out a hair in the urinal, toddle over to the trash and throw it away, and then return to do his business. But then he decided by 18 months that he wanted nothing to do with the urinal either.

We were able to get him to sit on the Baby Bjorn toilet trainer somewhere between that and 2 years old by bribery with books, and most of his early education did occur on the pot. Even when he was mostly dry, though, he refused to give up his diapers until he was 2 1/2 (the first day I became a full-time mom again).

Now it's still sometimes a challenge to get him to the potty, but it's usually because he can hold it for 6-7 hours, and I try to make him go whenever I need to, or before we go out, and he just doesn't feel the urge.

I think the E.C. might have been more successful if he had been home full-time, of course, but part of it, I think, was his resistance to being told to do anything, and it was just a personality thing.

I haven't done any perfect pitch training with my child, although I find the concept interesting. I happen to have perfect pitch myself, and I found reading the website interesting, although sometimes a bit over the top, for example, "The coming generation will discover a meaning and delight in sound which has, until now, been inaccessible to humankind." (Suggesting that those of us who do have perfect pitch have meaning and delight but are somehow inhuman?)

From what I could find by a superficial examination of the links, I did not see any examples of specific games to see if I thought this would be indeed something my 3 year old would engage in, so I'm not sure what I think of their program.

I personally find perfect pitch to be helpful, although it's not the Holy Grail of music education the proponents of this system seem to promote. I memorize and learn pieces proficiently, but so did my sister, who didn't have perfect pitch. I didn't have more confidence before performances--I usually threw up before auditions. I do find it easy to sing parts because I can ignore the tendency to follow the melody. Singing with different pianos all tuned differently throws me off for a little while until I force myself to retune. Singing in another key altogether makes me crazy.

One thing that struck me about this particular program is that they suggest that a 3-5 year old can't read musical notation, especially without colored notes. I learned at the age of 4 from my mother without colors or any $300 program. This program's timeline shows children introduced to traditional black and white notation at age 6 or 7. Maybe it's so they can sell more plastic balls and stickers, deliberately produced in colors that would be hard to find elsewhere. $30 for 7 plastic balls is crazy, and they want you to buy 4 sets of them?

My feeling is, perfect pitch is a handy thing to have, sort of like being able to whistle through your fingers to hail a taxi, or being able to tell if it's going to rain by the feel in your bones. I don't think it ensures that one is going to have a successful career in music, or so dramatically enhance one's perception of the auditory world that he or she is on some stratosphere "inaccessible to humans." It does mean that the out of tune jingle to NPR will grate one one's nerves especially early in the morning.

I can recall learning to read music when I was four. My mother sat me down with a "the Green Book, Pre A), explained to me how the notes went up and down the staff, and just let me practice for myself. There was a crack on the A key above middle C--that helped. I was motivated in trying to play songs ahead of my older sister. No fancy method, no flash cards, no computers. Just good old sibling rivalry.

I continued formal piano lessons with a conservatory professor through the senior college level and never had any problems with the sight reading testing before a jury. I can play music by ear and most of the time think I have perfect pitch, but when I play my own piano too much (which is sadly out of tune), I start to think all other pianos are playing a half step too high.

As an aside, I will mention that my heritage is Chinese, but I am hopeless in Mandarin. The rest of my family speaks or at least understands Mandarin, but do not have perfect pitch.

I tried the doremisoft games linked by HH (Hellene) for myself before trying them with my child.

My experience with the first game (notes falling from trees into baskets) was interesting. I found it quite challenging, as I am used to a traditional horizontal staff, so I found myself relying on the piano pitch played with each note, rather than reading the note on the staff. My ear could identify the note quicker than my eye could see and rotate the staff mentally. In IQ testing in fourth grade, my spatial mental manipulative ability was apparently one of my stand out strengths, so it leads me to wonder how much more difficult it is to learn the staff first vertically and then have to learn to rotate it.

I also found it difficult once the staff was placed horizontally to use the left and right arrows to move the baskets up and down. There are up and down arrows on the keypad. It seems that using those would just remove one bit of confusion out of the game, especially for a young child, to whom these games are targeted.

I liked the second game, with the horizontal staff and the puzzle pieces a good deal better. I can see this being something my child would be intrigued by watching, then of course want to try. However, my complaint is the same--the up and down arrows would be much more intuitive, but one can only use left and right arrows.

I do think the games are very clever and engaging, even though they have not sold me on the interchangeability of vertical and horizontal notation.