Music Playgroup

Today I took Alisa to her first "Little Ones Music Play" group. It is held at the Women's Pavilion (attached to the hospital) where she was born. She is in the 6-to-11-months-old group which meets every Friday at 11 AM for 30 minutes. It is a group led by FSU musical therapists as part of a research study. Participation is free and voluntary (I can go as often or as seldom as I wish). They do developmental tests every 6 months for each child. Alisa's first test will be on December 14th and they said they will just watch her play with toys and ask me some questions.

There were 9 other babies there today (only 1 boy) and Alisa was so interested in the ones around her and their mommies. The leader sang while playing the guitar and we mommies did various activities with our babies according to the song. We learned some baby sign language that went along with some of the songs. Other songs had actions (banging drums, puppets, snuggling with mommy, random movements, etc) or a large book to go along with it. Alisa didn't want to sit still on the mat or in my lap most of the time. She kept crawling to go exploring. It will be neat to see the transition of her recognizing songs after hearing them repeatedly and then starting to do the movements with everyone.

Other than the music playgroup, today was a normal day for Alisa. She took her usual morning and afternoon nap but her evening nap was something else. I put her down at 7:00 PM thinking she'd sleep the usual 30 minutes then wake up, eat and go back to bed for the night within 2 hours. Well, she never woke up. I guess she's out for the night. The problem is that she is not in her warm pajamas and her diaper needs to be changed or it will be so full by morning that it will leak and her pajamas will be wet on her tummy area (she mostly sleeps on her tummy these days). Therefore, I'm going to go in there soon and change her. We'll see how it goes. Hey, if she does wake up I certainly won't mind holding her till she falls back asleep. There have only been about 3 nights in the past 4 months that she woke up 3-4 hours after she went to sleep and cried and cried so I held her and rocked her back to sleep (didn't take long but I held her longer because I didn't want to put her down yet). I treasure those rare and precious times.