Ascribing powers beyond her age

chase  ·  Wed, Aug 19, 2015

Milo is almost always eating or sleeping, but sometimes she lays awake on the bed or the couch and stares at her surroundings. We know enough about the cognitive development of children to understand that she can’t see too far in front of her, that she can’t really track objects, that she has no sense of object permanence, and so on. We know that when she seems to be staring deeply into our eyes, it may seem to her no different than staring at a wall. But we sure do like to pretend.

I sweep my finger from left to right in front of her face, and cup my mouth when I call out to her to project the sound all over the place. Most of the time her head doesn’t budge, but occasionally it does, and when by coincidence it happens to budge in the direction I intended, well…

Remember that episode of The Office where the entire staff is rooting for the bouncing DVD logo to hit exactly in the corner of the screen? And when it does, they burst out in cheers?

Yeah, it’s like that.