A great way to promote speech development is to teach your baby animal sounds. This will help them to say words later on. There is no age too young to start this and actually they can still benefit from animal sounds well into their two’s. It’s not even just animal sounds that are helpful. Any kind of sound like the one a car makes, an airplane, or the beep beep of a horn.

I saw this wonderful post on Devoted Parenting about how to reduce the risk of SIDS.
SIDS stands for “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” which is the cause of death listed a lot of the time when babies just stop breathing in their sleep and there is no other way to explain it. It is a horrific thing for any parent to have to go through which is why I feel compelled to share the link here so that nobody has to experience this.
I noticed that one of the things Lynda listed is that if you give your baby pacifier that helps reduce the risk of SIDS in the first year of life. I believe this is a relatively new safety tip. I heard the reason for this is that when a baby is sucking on a pacifier it is giving the brain a reminder to breath at the same time.
I know that many parents don’t want to give a pacifier because they are concerned their baby will not want to give it up when they are older. For us, we did give our DD a pacifier because it helped her to sleep better at night (plus I had heard the info. about SIDS). What we did is it NEVER left the crib, she was only allowed to have while she was sleeping and it was part of our routine that when she woke up she had to drop the paci into her crib. Then when she was around 18 months old I just took it out of her crib one day and put it away and she never cried or asked for it. I’m not trying to brag for those of you who have had a harder time getting rid of it. But this is what seemed to work for us. Luckily little E is just a very adaptable baby and she accepted that it was time to get rid of her paci.