How To Learn How Your Baby Learns

This episode is all about The Heart Of It curriculum, which is now known as the Learn With Less™ Curriculum Transcript of this week’s interview with mother of two young children (and founder of Lil’ollo), Alexandra Nicoletti. Our discussion focuses on Alexandra’s experience becoming a mother, and how her access to the Learn With Less Curriculum as a beta tester has changed that experience the second time around, on both an emotional and practical level. Ayelet: I’d like to welcome, Alexandra Nicoletti, who is a good friend of mine. We met when I was pregnant with my first child, and she was also pregnant with her first child at that time. Since, she has become the mother of a beautiful baby girl who is now just over 3 months old. Alex, thanks so much for being here with us on Learn With Less today. I just want to talk to you because you’ve been beta testing the Learn With Less™ curriculum for the last 3 months or so, since Nel was born. [baby coos in background]… And there she is! As a parent of young children, you’ve had the experience now of going through infancy, both your “first time parenting experience” and then, now, with this added curriculum access. So, what was it like for you to become a parent, what are some of the feelings that went around becoming a mum for the first time? Alexandra: Well, I… there’s so many different emotions, and I approached motherhood, the first time, a bit like a research project. And I thought that… I like to research, I like to be prepared, and I like to understand everything. And I thought that if I read all the books and all the internet articles, and I prepared, and I was fit and I was strong and I did the yoga, I would follow my birth plan, and Marco would just be really happy and there’d be no problems, and he’d obviously sleep through the night from three weeks and be doing headstands by five weeks, because, you know, I’d done all of my preparation! And obviously, as you know, it doesn’t work out like that! These amazing little people are born as they are, they’re not blank slates, and it was a huge shock to the system because Marco, poor thing, had the colic and the reflux and the cow’s milk protein allergy, and all these things you can’t prepare for really, and research and it’ll all be ok. They’re things you have to move through with them as best you can, and I found it an incredibly tough experience to start off… with this huge amount of love for this little man, and I wanted to just do the absolute best I could, but I felt completely at sea. “I found it an incredibly tough experience to start off… with this huge amount of love for this little man, and I wanted to just do the absolute best I could, but I felt completely at sea. ” — Alexandra Nicoletti Alexandra Nicoletti, mother and small business owner There’s no manual for parenthood, although people do try very hard to claim that they’ve written one. There’s no manual, there’s no one-size-fits-all, these people are individuals, and the early days were really challenging. And of, I think, the delights in Marco’s first year, was meeting you, being with you on this starting journey of Learn With Less –  and just wishing that we could do the classes every day, because they were so helpful! It provided a tool kit, and it provided an ethos.