Slings, The art of Baby Wearing

A new born is always good news, but also synonym of sleepless nights and long, tiring days. Your baby seems to need you all the time and you end up finding difficult to get anything else done. However, traditional cultures have found natural ways to carry their babies and seem to successfully integrate their babies into their daily busy lives.

Babywearing has many benefits:

-Babies cry less and are happier when they are worn regularly. Research has shown that babies who are carried cry 43% less overall and 54% less in the evening hours. It has proved to be of special help with those babies suffering from gases and colic.

-Creates special bond with your baby. The physical closeness of carrying your baby develops a strong bond between baby and wearer. This closeness has also been proved to reduce distress and separation anxiety in babies.

-Increases baby’s emotional and mental development. Closeness to the parent offers emotional comfort to the baby. When carried, babies develop quicker a sense of security and confidence, becoming more independent and self-confident children.
Baby becomes spectator of how life and daily activities evolve around them. They see the world from their parents’ level, the extra stimulation makes babies to spend more time in a “quiet, alert state” which is the optimal for learning process.

-Encourages baby’s physical development. The close contact with their parents helps newborns in the transition between life in the womb to life in the outside world. Babies carried in slings tend to sit up and stand up earlier.

- More freedom. Because your hands are free you can carry on with your daily life. The care of your baby becomes easier as he joins you as a quiet spectator in your daily activities.

You have your baby close to kiss him, comfort him or talk to him without the need to interrupt what you are doing, and your daily life becomes easier, to take a bus or a walk, to look after your other children. The world is at your hand to enjoy!

Sing & Sign with babies

Sing and sign is a programme of familiar nursery songs and rhymes that teach babies and toddlers simple gestures by which they learn to communicate. It’s fun for parents and babies and engages the little ones that already recognise the popular songs.

Baby signing is a natural and normal process; even babies that haven’t gone through any training sign daily to communicate from a very early age. By singing and signing you enjoy a bonding experience with your baby. You only need to learn a few signs, some of them you will find familiar and the others easy to remember.

By teaching through music the experience of learning baby signing becomes easy and fun. Babies love repetition, they will learn the songs along with the signs and very soon you can see amazing results, as they enjoy the songs they will start signing along in short time.

Although sign language is practiced with babies from very early age, sing and sign have proved to be more beneficial for babies from 6 months onwards, as this is the stage where children start using signs more actively to communicate.

If you want to try it at home, there are different types of material you can try, DVDs or books. We recommend:
The very popular DVDs

Sing & Sign Books:

Elimination Communication, the Natural Infant Hygiene

Natural Infant Hygiene, also known as Elimination Communication (EC) is a way of communicating with your baby about his/her needs to “eliminate”. In other words, is the introduction of the baby to the toilet at a very early age, as early as newborn and, usually before 6 months old. Babies starting this process after 6 months old they are called “late starters”, and because they have already become conditioned to the use of diapers they might be less aware of their toilet needs.

As novel as this may sound, this is not a new concept; millions of women have done it in the past and, nowadays, it is still a normal practice in some parts of Africa, Asia and South America, here women carry their babies and are aware, at the same time, of their babies elimination needs.

The basic idea behind the practice of EC is the fact that, in the same way babies are aware of when they are hungry or tired, they are also aware of their needs to eliminate, which they try to communicate in a way or another. Although most of these babies are potty trained by the age of 18 months (usually when their diapered counterparts start this process) the emphasis of EC is not on how many pees you catch or how soon the baby is trained, but more in the process of communication between caregiver and baby and the special bond that is built as a result of this.

Among the benefits of practising EC are:

-Creates a special bonding between parent and baby, due to the close communication and awareness.

- Babies feel more comfortable. The practise of EC creates babies that cry less than their diapered counterparts, as they feel clean and dry. Some parents believe that the practise of EC prevents most of the baby rashes suffered by diapered babies.

-Promotes baby independence; as babies feel more in control and aware of their physical needs and ability to communicate them, babies become more independent and self-confident at an early age.

-It is a more economical solution, after all the practise of EC is a direct benefit for your family budget.

- Better for the environment; if you think “disposables” think better, actually they are NOT disposables. Diapers are not biodegradable and constitute the third largest contributor to landfills.

If you would like to give a try to Natural Infant Hygiene, these are two of the best books to get you started: