These are all the things I learned from watching an ITV documentary called The Secret Life of Babies.
- We have more bones in our body at birth than an adult does
- You’re not born with knee caps
- Babies laugh 300 times a day
- Babies can’t produce tears for the first few months
- A baby will have crawled 70 miles by their second birthday
- On arrival a baby’s blood stream re-routes from the placenta to the lungs closing a hole in the heart. This change would need open heart surgery in an adult
- Babies have a natural ability to swim with a reflex that allows water to go into their stomach rather than their lungs (never try this without a professional swimming teacher)
- Adults can only identify the 45 sounds that make up our mother tongue, but at 6 months, babies can hear the difference between 150 sounds that make up every language in the world.
- Babies are born prepared to learn and speak any language
- Babies watch our mouths when learning new words
- Scientists think that baby babble might not just be random noises to them
- Babies can understand 3 x more words than they can say
- In the first 2 years of our lives we learn to think, walk, feel, talk and start relating to the world around us
