Jennifer Espinal

BABY BOOK DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

My mother would describe her pregnancy as joyful for the most part. She would find herself quite relaxed since no one ever let her do anything; she was practically treated like a queen. I was given my first name Jennifer because my mother liked the name, my father wanted to name me Madeline, but my mother shut him

down, she told him “since I’m the one who’s going through all this pain, I get to choose the name”. My last name however was given

to me in honor of my grandmother, Vivian Espinal Besides my father’s suggestion my mother’s top five choices for girls were Jennifer, Sofia, Maribel, Brianna, and Natalya. Her choice for a

boy was Freddy Jr.

GENERAL FACT SHEET

My mother was in labor for six hours, she said six was the time she spent in the hospital but she started to have contractions way before that, which I had apparently been playing games with her. She also wanted to cut the time close but eventually the pain got the best of her and all she wanted was the drugs. My birth weight was six and a half pounds and nine inches in height. At the mere age of two months I had learned to sit up. My first tooth came in at around four months of age and I had taken my first steps at

around the age of one. I was officially potty trained at two years old.

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

My first word was “mama”, I said this word around five months of age, and my father on the other hand had been apparently

disappointed with my choice of a word since it had no direct correlation to him. My first sound consisted of “ahh” in a

somewhat adorable way; my mother said my first phrase was “que eso?” in English meaning “what’s that”. Apparently my favorite

phrase as a two year old was also my mother’s worst since I contently chased her around repeating it to her nonstop.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

As a toddler the person I was most attached to was my grandmother, at a young age I’ve always looked up to her,

materialistic wise I was attached to my many dolls, it quite frankly didn’t matter which one I was attached to all of them. They were

all my friends since I had only spoke Spanish growing up in a predominantly white school system, due to the language barrier; I

had little communication hence my lake of friends that weren’t Hispanic. I believe the overall effect of having no attachment in

one’s childhood can lead to the child becoming outgoing, if I didn’t have my dolls growing up it would have forced me to play

with other kids in school.

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

My greatest humility has to be in the eighth grade when we had gotten a new math teacher who looked extremely similar to one of the students in the class, and it didn’t help that he looked like the dirty-blonde version of Mclovin from “Super bad”. Well one day all of the desk were placed about a foot away from the front board, so I decided to ask him if that had made him feel claustrophobic, but instead of saying that I had a bad case of diarrhea mouth and ended up saying “does this make you feel constipated” and kept constantly repeating it over and over until I had come to the realization that the class was laughing at what I had said. I soon began to wonder how my diarrhea mouth made him feel.

I believe that at this stage of my life I consider myself to be in Kohlberg’s post conventional morality level. At this stage, I have begun to account for the differing values, opinions and beliefs of other people. I have realized that rules of law are important for maintaining a society, but members of the society should agree

upon these standards. Kohlberg’s final level of moral reasoning is based upon universal ethical principles and abstract reasoning. At

this stage, people follow these internalized principles of justice, even if they conflict with laws and rules. I believe most teenagers

are at this stage because they are constantly debating whether they’re actions can bring greater consequences than those few

moments of fun.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT