Day 1 - Dec 7th 2010

Today our second child was born – a beautiful girl named Anneliese. She weighed 3.69 kg and was 51 cm long and is healthy – scored 8 then 9 on the Apgar rating. So the first part of any early learning was complete – we had a child!! Obviously at this stage she is very young and still coming to grips with being yanked out of the uterus. But the early learning has started. As you can see from the image we have placed black and white images around the crib for our daughter to look at.

We got this idea from an information session at our local Montessori school a few year back before our first daughter was born. The idea is that the black and white cones on the retina are the first to be engaged by the brain, so by providing black and white images we are stimulating the brains information processing development.

At this stage we will rotate the images from white on black to black on white each day, to add some variety. At about 6 weeks, or when she starts tracking with her eyes fully we’ll start adding in colour. But that is a few weeks away. I should also not that she did actually track with her eyes a bit today. Focusing on my finger her eyes followed it to her nose. But not regularly. Yet.