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This is immediately after a 2.5 hour nap.

This girl is getting serious ideas about rolling over. This was her first move on the play mat, after she got 90% of the way over with Mom after breakfast.

So apparently it’s a good thing to let your infant learn about touch by exploring your face. So, I have let her claw at my mouth for the last 15 minutes. Harvard, look out!

Yes, father, that is a barely acceptable method for serving me my meal, I suppose.

I always secretly thought that early parenting was not dissimilar from dog training. Now that I have a human puppy of my own, I’m free to experiment with the techniques that worked well on Sous.

One of the core ideas in dog training is generalization: you first teach them a behavior in a very specific context, and then you generalize it. First, teach them to stay in the quiet of the kitchen, then the back yard, then the dog park, with the hope that one day you could yell “stay!” from the opposite side of a busy street and have them obey.

We’ve trained Annie to sleep well when swaddled–basically, with her arms pinned so she won’t swing her arms around and hit herself in the face. But, it would be nice if she didn’t need the swaddle to have a good nap. So, I’ve started to let just one arm out at a time during naps. First, it only worked for 45 minutes. Then, this morning, she had an arm out for the whole nap. A couple more days of this and I’ll have her napping without the straightjacket. Then, I guess, she should learn to nap while riding on Sous?

 

July 2015: stay at home dadding.