Push Over!

Rhea's not rolling over yet, a mile stone that I can extol on and on about, but she's certainly moving and vigorously jostling her entire body...it seems like she is going to roll over any day now. In the meanwhile, she has started pushing her toes and heels when lying on her back, pushing herself up with her chin (chin-ups :)) when she's picked up and creeping in her crib till she is horizontal. Enjoy this video. She ended up creeping at least 6-7 feet and she was panting at the end of it. She sure earned her cereal that day!

Smarter than you think!

I took Rhea to a study at Harvard's Laboratory for Developmental Studies recently. The lab does fascinating work in developmental psychology, and really confirms what parents have known for a very long time - babies are much more intelligent than adults tend to believe. Rhea participated in the "Music & Space" study which is investigating whether infants use spatial metaphors to represent music (over your head?? - it basically sees if high-low tones in music relate to "high-low" spatial positions of objects). Rhea was shown flowers dancing up and down along with high-low musical sounds. I have to admit - being tone-deaf, I wasn't able to distinguish between the sounds (again, maybe all these responses are involuntary and not trained responses; so in my defense even if I couldn't "tell" the difference, my brain might have known it). "Boredom" signaled that she wasn't terribly excited in the tone-flower combination, and that they could move to the next image-sound combination. The findings so far suggest that infants do in fact prefer to look at the matching space and tone combination. More such fascinating tidbits and studies are in their newsletter.

Diwali and Halloween Dressup

What a joy to be able to share Rhea's Halloween pictures...we had an extended photo session because the package from India did not arrive in time...so Diwali spilled into Halloween. Some of the pictures are from an evening session of book reading, that became a session of dress-up just because she was wearing a top from Fab India. She looks like a Kathiawadi goat herder in these pictures. Which reminds me of something really funny - we have put up L's pictures on our walls - one of the pictures is this one; and our nanny asked me if he was my grandfather. These cross-cultural anecdotes are hilarious!

A Typical Weekend

Weekends are a god-send, and come Friday night the entire mood in the house is different. We have now even managed to take Rhea out for sushi on a Friday night to our favorite sushi restaurant near Porter Sq. The weather gods have been kind so far, and except for a weird snow day a few weeks back, we have been blessed with sunshiny weekends. So we head out to Harvard Sq. most weekends for some lunch, strolling, shopping and coffee.