John and I are planning to follow Growing Kids God's Way... a parenting style per se. The secular version is Babywise. I bought the Babywise II version because its cheaper and I can get it on my kindle.
Anyhoo, Babywise II is for ages 6-12 months. One of the biggest things I liked about this book was the idea of "blanket time" or "playpen time." The idea behind blanket time is that you can start putting your child (once they are 4 months old) on a blanket by themselves for some independent play. It fosters independence from mom and dad and gives them some focus time for creativity and learning. This becomes more important as they get older. Basically, I put Aden on a blanket (starting for 5-10 minutes) with a toy or two and then leave his line of sight. I also put a timer on for however long its going to be and then let him at it.
Aden has done really well with this so far, partly because we've unintentionally given him some independent play time under a mobile since he was quite young. The reason for the timer is so that they know when the timer goes off, play time is over.
As Aden gets older and can crawl, we also add playpen time where the concept is the same but there are the confines of the playpen. What is interesting to me is that you still have blanket time when they move, you just teach/train them to stay on the blanket and play within its confines. I'm not exactly sure how one teaches a crawler to stay in a 4x4 foot area but I'll let you know if I figure it out. I did watch this youtube video of some 13 month old twin girls having separate blanket time and staying put so it can be done!
Here is Aden during some blanket time right before I swoop him up!
Outfit from Vicki... Thanks Vicki!
Anyhoo, Babywise II is for ages 6-12 months. One of the biggest things I liked about this book was the idea of "blanket time" or "playpen time." The idea behind blanket time is that you can start putting your child (once they are 4 months old) on a blanket by themselves for some independent play. It fosters independence from mom and dad and gives them some focus time for creativity and learning. This becomes more important as they get older. Basically, I put Aden on a blanket (starting for 5-10 minutes) with a toy or two and then leave his line of sight. I also put a timer on for however long its going to be and then let him at it.
Aden has done really well with this so far, partly because we've unintentionally given him some independent play time under a mobile since he was quite young. The reason for the timer is so that they know when the timer goes off, play time is over.
As Aden gets older and can crawl, we also add playpen time where the concept is the same but there are the confines of the playpen. What is interesting to me is that you still have blanket time when they move, you just teach/train them to stay on the blanket and play within its confines. I'm not exactly sure how one teaches a crawler to stay in a 4x4 foot area but I'll let you know if I figure it out. I did watch this youtube video of some 13 month old twin girls having separate blanket time and staying put so it can be done!
Here is Aden during some blanket time right before I swoop him up!
I don't know if you can see it, but there is line of drool coming out of Aden's mouth. I don't know why but drool seems to be a lot cuter in pictures to me. And obviously drool is only 'cute' on your own kids. Its every other kid who is a slobbery mess.
If you figure out how to make blanket time work with a crawler, let me know! We were doing it for a while, but I just didn't think Brax could understand that there was a boundary at the edge of the blanket yet. I was constantly saying no as he tried to go for a toy beyond the blanket, and he was getting frustrated because I don't think he understood why it was a no. We decided to take a break from it for a while. He has enough other off-limits areas where we can train "no," and we do playpen time where he gets the independent play in. But it would be nice to have him be able to stay on the blanket so we could take it other places with us.
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