MOMMY SCIENCE deals with the first few weeks and months of a baby’s life.  It describes a newborn and the very earliest steps of learning and unlearning, as parent and baby learn about one another.  It also describes changes in a new parent, particularly the mother, and how to survive organizing a household that is suddenly far more complicated.  

The lessons about how to deal with this particular newborn start immediately.  It seemed to me that my children began to manifest their characters at this stage, establishing themes that emerged time and again in childhood and all the way to adulthood.  This means that an observant parent might devise some guidelines that suggest new things to try (or avoid) for each one.  For example, one of my go-to techniques for teaching a baby to smile to be picked up could fall into disuse and then be revived for dealing with tantrums, and everything I’d ever learned about getting through to a child had to be applied for the one who had repeated, especially severe tantrums.

Everything I learned went into my toolkit, and I was surprised at how often I would pull out some dusty implement, in order to apply it in a new way.