Thursday, December 01, 2005

One Year

Haven't written in a while. Brain dump:

Sofi is one year old as of 11/27. I should go back and read through the blog archives. Her grandparents (on my side) were down for Thanksgiving and her birthday - and she seems to hate them. She cries when they hold her; she doesn't play the "giving game" with them - in fact, when she gives me something and I hand it to her grandma she'll immediately snatch it back and give it to me again. If I persist in handing the item off to grandma, she'll start to get upset. Hoping this will pass with more exposure. We'll see them again at Christmas.

She's starting to amass a small collection of toys - nothing compared to her cousin, but more than enough. She likes balls and musical instruments. (One toy, where if you put balls in receptacles it plays music, is a real winner.)

She's starting to show some signs of language - she makes the "milk" sign all the time, now - we think she thinks it means "mommy", because that's who she gets when she makes it. Started giving her cow milk yesterday when she made the sign and noooo that's not what she meant. Words I think I've heard her say include "ball", "book", "turkey", "zoo". We've also taught her how to stick out her tongue and say "ah" - recorded some video footage yesterday of her holding a car adapter like a microphone and singing "ah" into it.

Recording video is a pain, by the way. Unlike photography which is more fire-and-forget, with video you've got to download it and edit it and it's a bit much. I'll record video when she's extremely cute but that's about it. I do somewhat regret the purchase of the camcorder.

This morning, when she was trying to put a baby food lid on a yogurt container and getting a little frustrated that it wasn't working, something occurred to me. I always imagined we start out seeing the world as it really is, and as we get older we grow filters and make abstractions and turn the world into symbols. Like, when we're young, instead of seeing "table", we see this brown wooden platform-and-legs shape with a grainy texture. *The Scientist In The Crib* says this isn't the case, but it didn't really hit home until I saw Sofi trying to put the baby food lid on the yogurt container. It seems like, to her, "baby food container" and "yogurt container" are the same - so why can't she take the lid from one and put it on the other? It's like we're born with the abstractions and it's not until we're older that we start noticing refinements. Which is why at first we draw stick figures and it's not until later that we can draw people with thickness and lighting and so on.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sofi needs a ball popper.

You drop the ball in through the top, and it rolls around and either pops out of the top or rolls back through.

Wonderful piece of equipment, if you can stand all the giggling and cackling . . .

Wait until she's two-ish or so -- or whenever her vocabulary develops to the point that she can hold in-depth conversations.

Take her to a Modern Art Museum, and record her impressions. It will amaze you . . .

John Sage, at three, could walk into any room of the Ft. Worth Museum of Modern Art and pick out the Jackson Pollack (he snubbed the Picasso, and thought Matisse was fun). He said, after contemplating the painting in silence for several minutes of rapt concentration, that this man was very, very sad, and he hoped he felt better someday.