Anyone that knows me will say for certainty that I’m not a sentimental person. But even I have a weakness for soft music overlaid moving images. This is a real moment stripped of anything phony, and if it doesn’t pull at your heart-string, then probably nothing will. What a candid and special moment this is.
Enjoy!
Synopsis: “Do you remember how you felt when you had your first kiss? This was captured by accident, in its most innocent form. If only it could be this way every time… Meet Elliott and Bowie.”
Hey, this is a cute one for the boys and girls. Sign PENGUIN, it’s a fun sign to do! Just drop your hands to your hips and wiggle back and forth like penguins do!
Synopsis: “Cookie is a “Little Penguin” and the mascot of the Zoo Bird House. I shot this video while working there as a Guest Keeper for book research and for my blog, “Parrot Nation.”
This video by Rebecca Black has taken the Internet by storm! It’s awful, but in such a beautiful way. I played it for my son and he loved it. There are so many fun videos for toddlers on the Internet. Having said that, we do play some classics for our boy by Raffi – on good old fashion vinyl. I can’t say he can really tell the difference between either of them, but he does tend to bop more to the Rebecca than Raffi. Usually, he’ll just sway to Raffi or have some quiet time on the couch after his nap.
Watch five and a half month old baby Emerson on YouTube scare and laugh when Mom blows her nose! Ever thought about where laughing comes from? I did, so I did some research. It turns out that laughing probably stems from the same fear center in our brain so they’re connected. Humour comes from being surprised! Hence we get surprised by a joke, this “startles us”, then when we find out that it’s not as scary as we thought, we laugh! It’s an interesting theory anyway and seems to apply in this video.
Another interesting thing about laughing is that in every culture around the world, it always follows a similar pattern. Researcher Robert Provine found that laughing is always “ha-ha-ha” or “ho-ho-ho” but never “ha-ho-ha-ho.” However sometimes it goes “cha-ha-ha” or “ha-ha-ho.”
Quote from the original YouTube video: “My five-and-a-half-month old son Emerson isn’t sure what to think when I blow my nose. Sometimes he’s terrified, then he can’t stop laughing.”
Like all good things, some previous entity of it existed before only to be recycled into something the next generation thinks is “new.” Sign language has been around for a long, long time. For as long as people where deaf, there was a method to communicate, and before this, when we all lacked spoken language (think in evolutionary time blocks), we used some from of body language to convey thoughts to one another. This is the how and the why of silent communication, however, there’s more to baby sign language than this.
For over 30 years experts have been dabbling in baby sign language, but it wasn’t until it made its big screen début in the Hollywood movie Meet The Fockers, that it gained it’s rightful foothold on the general population. I don’t use “rightful” loosely either, I really do think all parents should use signs with their children, but this is for another discussion.
In the movie Robert De Niro’s character Jack Byrnes teaches his grandson “Little Jack” (actor Bradley and Spencer Pickren) sign language. In the movie, he shows Ben Stiller’s character Greg Focker, baby sign language flash cards depicting various signs.
A scene from the movie goes as follows:
GREG: “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about this baby signing stuff, this is like cutting edge…”
JACK: “Well at his age, Greg, his mind is like a sponge. But when he reaches your age, for example, his mind will be far less capable of absorbing useful information.”
I will applaud the movie since Little Jack signs well and accurately. This is likely the reason the movie launched baby sign language to the forefront – this and the fact that the movie does an excellent job at explaining why sign language is important to infants. Like all good trends, baby sign language needed a solid boost and Hollywood rose to fill the job. After the movie aired in 2004 it sparked worldwide interest in baby sign language. It didn’t take parents long to figure out that baby sign language was a real thing and that it produced real measurable benefits. Not only this, but the audience learned that signing was useful to hearing babies too.
