tummy time

We’ve been told by several people that babies operate in phases. Good or bad, whatever they are doing changes about every two weeks. We’ve found this to be true for the most part. But he’s got one phase that’s lasted about a month now. He doesn’t like being on his tummy. He used to take long, deep naps that way, but that stopped some time in March. Slowly he’s coming around to it again. He isn’t crying in the video. These high pitched sounds, some might call them screams, are his way of communicating.. We encourage this kind of communication (it’s much better than crying, which distresses me) and get it when he’s wet as well. He makes similar noises when he’s happy. I think that when he’s upset, the sounds focus on ‘ee’. When he’s happy, it’s ‘o’ or ‘ah.’ ‘A’ like in cat appears often, but it seems to go both ways.

So why bother with tummy time if he doesn’t like it? As most of you know, there are a bunch of developmental skills that babies get from spending time on their tummies. They still get these skills if they don’t have tummy time, but often much later and sometimes with difficulty. The skill in this video is probably the first that comes – lifting his head. Paul’s mom, Jenny, is a primary school teacher. While she was here, she told us that there appears to be a link between crawling and grasping concepts later such as left and right. One of the activities that some of the students who are put in resource classes do is crawling. So even though Tim isn’t fond of tummy time right now, Paul does it with him every day. I hear both Paul and I saying to Tim: ‘I know you don’t like it, but it’s good for you.’ And so it begins. He took this video this morning before he left for work.



tummy time