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RAZZAMATAZZBERRY!

© Heike Boehnke

Finally my 15 month old daughter has discovered that her books and not just handy, colorful teething objects!! All of those beautiful “baby” books I bought during the course of my pregnancy and in the first few months of her life on earth look like the have been passed down in the Mouse family! I love to read, and tenderly reminisce about the nights spent in bed reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon under the covers with a flashlight, or the hours spent in the “Secret Garden”. I wanted my daughter to get a good start with a great library of classics!

Then there are all the articles that tell you that you must READ to your baby. Am I the only one with a baby who doesn’t want to sit and be read to? I almost panicked; my daughter had no interest whatsoever, other than eating Winnie-the-Pooh! Since she also seems to be the only 15 month old who doesn’t say BABA, DADA, STOP, DOG, etc, ..I just knew I was a terrible mother and it was my fault that my child’s language skills were non-existent! (Never mind that I speak to her in two languages, enough to confuse myself!).

All of a sudden, out of the blue, my daughter brings me one of her little board books and hands it to me. YES!! It’s my favorite too, “Jamberry” by Bruce Degen. She calmly sits next to me as I sing the totally unlogical “Hatberry, Shoeberry, In my canoeberry” and giggles away! Next we try Sandra Boyton's “MOO! BA! LA LA LA!” cute and colorful, our favorite page is “three singing pigs go LA LA LA!” Here I get the support of my backup singer, who knows exactly that all pigs go LA!LA!LA!

I have finally grasped the concept. The classics, such as Runaway Bunny, Midnight Moon, and Pat the Bunny didn’t grasp my daughter, because they did not have the “sing-song”. I personally still don’t get the concept of Midnight Moon, but I am not a child. With this new discovery, I pulled out the Mother Goose I was saving for toothless days and off we went, into a whole new world. The short, rhythmic poems entranced us both. Some of the rhymes were weird to me, didn’t make sense, or had a morbid undertone, but my daughter was having a blast.

Alas, and has fate should have it, this months “As they grow-1 year” segment of Parenting Magazine features the importance of nursery rhymes in the development of language and listening skills. Babies subconsciously learn to associate certain words to certain movements, a first time favorite being “Pat-e-Cake”! Reciting nursery rhymes can be just as important as reading to your child, as the repetition sensitizes the child to individual units of sounds. The article also introduces 5 learning rhymes, fun little tidbits that encourage the development of different skills, i.e. large and fine motor skills.

The copyright of the article RAZZAMATAZZBERRY! in Attachment Parenting is owned by Heike Boehnke. Permission to republish RAZZAMATAZZBERRY! in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.