Karen Sandler

Tag: babies

  • We Have a Cover

    Just a short post to announce that I can now reveal the cover art for TANKBORN, my dystopian young adult novel that will be coming out in September 2011 from Lee & Low’s new YA/MG imprint, Tu Books. Lee & Low announced the three launch books on their Open Books blog. You can check out the cover there, or hop on over to my website (where this blog also appears) for a slightly larger version. The blurb for the book is on my booklist page.

    I’m so excited about my cover. I think it looks great. There’s one kind of cool-creepy aspect to the image. If you look closely at it (you’ll have to examine the larger one that’s on my site) you’ll see the floating babies have tattoos on their cheeks that match the one on the heroine, Kayla’s, face. You’ll have to read the book to find out what that’s all about.

    So please check it out and tell me what you think!

  • Hablando en español

    I have been studying Spanish for a long, long time. For decades, if you start counting from the third grade when I was first exposed to el caballo, el gato, and el perro. In elementary school, we would watch a fifteen minute Spanish lesson on TV, where the teacher would bate, bate chocolate and sing Dos y dos son cuatro, cuatro y dos son seis… (which I just learned comes from a song by Stanley Lucero).

    I took Spanish all through high school, skipped it entirely in college (oddly, there was no foreign language requirement for my BA), then took classes here and there since then, some private, some not. I have a killer accent, probably because I started studying so young, but unless I’m kind of dumped into a situation where I have to speak only Spanish (like when I went to Mexico), I have to think really hard to say what I want to say.

    I bring this up because I just read about an interesting study where it was discovered that bilingual 8-month-old babies are better able to distinguish between two languages, even if they don’t speak either language. Better still, babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual “boost” that will improve their thinking throughout their lives. Babies not exposed to a second language don’t have the same visual discrimination skills as bilingual babies do.

    Bilingual babies are apparently able to notice variances in how the face moves when a person is speaking one language versus another. Watching a muted video of people speaking French and English, for example, they could see differences in how the lips moved, how the jaw opened and closed and other facial changes. They’d get bored if a language they’d already been exposed to was repeated, but perk up if it was a new-to-them language.

    What’s also interesting about this is that learning a new language when you’re older is one way that’s supposed to fend off dementia. Bilingual Alzheimer’s patients are, on average, four to five years older. That is, being bilingual, they’re staving off the Alzheimer’s a few years longer.

    So, I’m going to keep studying español. Maintain those brain cells best I can. And speak Spanish to my beautiful granddaughter every chance I get.

  • Oh, So Cuddly

    As I write this, I’m babysitting my nearly 3-month-old granddaughter. She’s asleep at the moment, hence my ability to compose a blog post. I am not exaggerating, nor am I the least bit biased when I say that my granddaughter is the most beautiful baby ever born. It is simply a fact. 🙂

    There is something completely irresistible about babies. Their smiles are so bright, their laughter so enchanting. It’s so much fun seeing them interact with their world. Everything is new to a baby. And they’re so wonderful to hold and cuddle.

    Apparently that fascination for babies and the urge to hold them is rather universal among primates.  I read a very cool study study here about how vervet monkeys and sooty mangabeys adore new babies. But those primate moms require a certain amount of quid pro quid quo before another female can sniff, touch, or hold their baby.

    The medium of exchange in baby cuddling for vervets and mangabeys is grooming of the mother. A vervet who’s just given birth to an adorable infant might require ten minutes of “hair brushing” before she’ll let another female interact with her baby. A female who’s higher status than the mom might get some cuddle time for a shorter grooming session, a lower status might have to work longer. The more babies there are in a group of vervets or mangabey’s, the less they’re “worth” in grooming time. And the older a baby gets, the less interest there is from the other females. In one mangabey group, a baby the age of my granddaughter didn’t even earn its mom four minutes of grooming.

    As far as I’m concerned, my sweet grandbaby is worth a whole spa treatment if that’s what my daughter-in-law wants. A massage, some peeled grapes and a box of chocolates, too. She is just that perfect.