Thank you all for your love, support, and encouragement!!
We just got back from the hospital, and let me tell you - the final 11 minutes of labor were the most valuable of all. The reason? He was born at 12:10am, and this put his birth on the next day, which earned us an additional night! The birthday is the official start time and they gave us 2 nights. This turned out to be quite fortuitous. As great as we were doing on the first day, we were doing almost that poorly on the second day. He went from easy going to difficult to please literally overnight. The second day, I watched in horror as we were using a pacifier to sooth him. Except, it wasn’t simple soothing (which I would have still not liked), it was every minute he wasn’t feeding. As a result, I spent maybe 5 minutes working with him and he did vocalize a new vowel sound at what seemed to be my insistence (but I’m far less sure my introducing this sound is what “caused” him to vocalize it)… so now he’s said the short a and long o. Short a is easy IMO since it’s similar to an infant scream (but when he did short a for me, he was just mimicking me and NOT screaming).
After a full day of wondering what happened to him (why his huge change in personality and being reduced to a crutch), we learned exactly what had happened. … turns out that we can “feed” him for an hour and yet, he’s massively undernourished!! (he lost something like 5% in his second day alone, normal is to lose 10% the entire first week!) So, we became a statistic of parents that plan on breastfeeding exclusively and “fail” - but, we’re using a hybrid method until her milk gets in.
Early learning goes both ways. We had to adjust our plans and adjust what our expectations and our strategies based on how he’s doing. Also, we learned that he’s tongue tied, and we did not know this until the second day. Tomorrow we’ll look into getting that fixed - no sense in trying to suffer through an obstacle when the remedy is easy and innocuous.
I’m confident at this point that if you give a baby something do-able, they will surprise you. I’m pretty sure I was the only parent in the entire hospital trying to figure out what “learning” activity I could do with a newborn. That’s not to pat myself on the back or anything, but to point out that the “average” and norms that get thrown at parents doing early learning simply will NOT apply. The norm is to do literally NOTHING or to educate by luck… and some parents are more lucky than others 
Anyway, thank you all again. We have a long road ahead and it won’t be easy… will be frustrating in ways that I never imagined, but my opinion this whole preparation time is that if I have something to focus on, at least it’s better than navigating by chance. I’m confident it will be worth it.
seastar… will do my best. I might start up a blog to track the activities. I can tell you what I’ve done so far…
when he’s alert (usually AFTER a feeding) I’ll sit with him face to face; my legs up on the seat, knees at 90degrees, and have him using my legs as a recliner. Since he’s alert and facing me, I can then do two things… I take a finger, maybe the same exact one, or one from each of my hands or two fingers from one hand, and try to get him to grip my finger. It’s good for him to grip and hold on; it’s reflexive, but the stimulation helps him develop (this according to Doman and according to Dr. Jones, so I’m confident it will help brain development some).
Then, while he’s hopefully holding on, I pick maybe two vowel sounds (far easier to start with vowels IMO) and repeat one of them several times with slightly different cadence/emphasis/emotional intonation. Then, after a few repeats, I’ll throw in a second vowel sound for contrast… and then I don’t have a method or anything, but sort of randomly toggle between the two sounds, spending more time on the one I think he’s more likely to say. I space my vocalizations by maybe 2 or 3 seconds - and certainly less than 5 seconds. I have to make it easy for his memory to remember it (pretty sure his memory is super short and by say 10 seconds he’s forgotten) - in other words, his audio working memory is very short, so short gaps between vocalizations, but having a gap is important as it gives him a chance to think about it and try.
Another thing I started doing today is saying a vowel sound that he seems to be trying to form with his mouth - but not sure if this will work or not.
That’s pretty much it for now. I’m going to start high contrast cards hopefully tonight, and then introduce a crawling track by the end of the week I hope.
And if baby is not happy, there’s no way he’s going to care about YOUR vocalizations unless you’re shushing and doing the 5 s’ss or something.
Now, when we feed, I did start doing something that’s not necessary and is more of a long term idea - we were encouraged to stimulate him by rubbing a body part when he starts to get lazy or sleepy while feeding (isn’t really sucking, but just sitting there for more than 4 or 5 seconds doing nothing)… so instead of just rubbing his foot, shoulder, chin, etc… I add in the NAME of the body part I’m rubbing. Keep it simple, singular, no verbs such as “I’m touching your tummy”… instead just “tummy” while I rub his tummy or what have you.
Of course, he has no real chance of understanding this yet… but my thought is that if I keep this up for 3 or 4 months, it will equal countless thousands of repetitions and he just might get the idea that SOUNDS can represent something in particular and vice versa. By sheer Pavlovian conditioning he should pick this up after enough repetitions, no? Will continue to do this (I see no reason not to, other than other people thinking I’m weird) - and will report if I think it’s helpful or not.
. Congratulations to all of you. I am sure we all be reading your teaching- learning updates as not everyone had luck knowing all the amazing things about EL before their baby was born as you .
A broken leg takes longer to heal than a few days in a jaundice blanket. How long does the tongue snip take to mend? I have no experience wight his one?