Your Baby Week 35
Can you believe how many milestones your little one has reached since that first day you brought him home from the hospital? A little over eight months ago your baby spent most of the day sleeping, and today getting them down for a nap or for the night might be a challenge. During their waking hours, their likes and dislikes become more and more clear each day. As their personality continues to develop, so will their expressions of independence. For example, by week 35, they may understand the word "No" when you say it, but they may not always listen.
By week 35, your baby has also probably figured out how to get into anything and everything. Even though they are still a few months away from walking, they might already be crawling, butt scooting, and maybe even climbing their way into trouble. It is even possible that your baby might begin to try cruising (walking around and holding onto furniture for support). You may want to revisit your child-safety checklist and continually make sure that friends and family are helping to keep your house baby safe whenever they visit; keeping purses and bags off the floor and out of baby's reach, never leaving hot drinks or plates of food unattended, placing utensils in safe places when they are done eating, and generally keeping the room free from clutter.
How babies learn language
Though there are still debates in the process of language acquisition, it is clear that long before your child speaks her first deliberate words, she will be developing her linguistic skills. The first step in acquiring language is understanding what people are saying to her. In other words, comprehension will come long before speech itself. At first, it all must sound like a jumble of sounds, but as the months pass, she learns to separate out discrete sounds. By 6 months of age, you probably noticed that she was able to understand individual words, and the best example of that is her name. This word recognition progresses to people and things that are verbally referenced most often, like mama, or dada, or siblings' names. After simple word recognition, she will begin to respond to simple commands that you have rehearsed with her most often, like "Wave bye-bye", "Give kisses", or "Show me a smile".
Raising a tidy baby
Struggling to keep the house clean with an infant on the loose can prove to be a stressful and fruitless task. Many new parents can find it difficult to let go of their former standards of cleanliness now that their infant seems to be wreaking havoc in all the clean spaces in the house. The truth is, you may have to let go of some of those former standards of cleanliness and accept that all infants make messes. Your best bet may be to simply contain the chaos. Giving your baby and their toys a room or two to themselves may be the best way for you to stay sane if you are particularly compulsive about keeping a clutter free home.
Interacting with their environment is how babies learn, so you don't want to deny them the freedom to roam and play, but you may want to keep some rooms off limits and clean. Baby gates are a safe and cost effective way to quarter off some areas of the house that you would like to maintain just for you. You may also want to start including your infant in clean-up time. Singing songs or simply interacting with your child at the end of a play session while the two of you pick up a few toys and place them away is a great early lesson of cleaning up after oneself.
