This week, MommyGarten.com is on vacay, yet focused on Mommy’s needs.

We’ll use this week to make sure that all the mommies who come to MommyGarten.com are caught up on the lessons of parenthood. We’re giving new moms a gift unlike any other: Sugar-free peace of mind.

So, please enjoy this look back at excerpts from earlier posts on what Mommies need to know about language development.

Parents who learn how to perform a fast and easy checkup on baby’s hearing will know when it’s time to find medical answers for any potential concerns.

They’ll also know when baby is developing just fine — and everyone can relax and get back to the fun stuff.

Yesterday’s blog post covered why it’s important to check on your child’s hearing. Today’s post tells you how to test your child’s hearing at home.

Your baby won’t know you’re checking up on him.  He’ll just think he has, and deserves, your undivided attention.  Again.

Ear infections are painful, difficult for new parents to detect, and they waste a lot of your baby’s time.

The kids most vulnerable to ear infections (people under the age of 2) are also the ones least able to tell you directly that something’s wrong.  Parents should look for cues like fussiness, elevated body temperature, and ear-tugging.

But parents can also rely on their growing toolkit of parenting skills to assess baby’s hearing. It is quick, easy, and cheap to perform an at-home, low-tech hearing test on an infant. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how to test baby’s ears. Today, I’ll tell you why you should.

If the commercial claimed: “Your baby can sculpt!”  you’d have probably said:  well, yeah, with play dough…

If the commercial promised: “Your toddler can paint!” you’d have probably wondered: that’s what she thinks I look like?…..

Why is it easy to see that it’s inappropriate to push some skills on our babies — but not others?

When it comes to reading, some parents place a big emphasis on how soon, how much, and how well their young children can decipher which ideas (aka “stories”) have been compressed into squiggles (aka “words”), and affixed to a two-dimensional surface (aka “page”).