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Week 211: Demands, Scabs, and Shadows February 12, 2008

I've mentioned before that Mandy has had a really mild personality for a baby. She started sleeping through the night as soon as we brought her home from the hospital, she's never been more attention seeking than seems necessary for a baby bent on survival and the occasional game of peek-a-boo, and she hasn't upset easily in general.

Until recently, anyway. In the last couple of weeks, Mandy seems to have learned that if she starts to ululate loudly, we will actually GIVE her things. I think of this as a kind of original sin and can easily imagine the moment at which Adam and Eve realize that hey this apple thing is pretty good and if they scream and point a lot that some inexplicably powerful being will give them things --THINGS THEY WANT NOW. And so it has begun, and fortunately for Mandy we can't just kick her out of the house and guard the front door with a giant flaming sword. For one, I can't find a giant flaming sword.

But who knows? Maybe it's teething. The kid still doesn't have a tooth in her head, and they've got to arrive sometime. In the meantime she screams and we give her things, like tortilla chips, which he gnaws and gums with a slightly pissed off look on her face. Maybe teeth will make it all better. She is walking really well, though, and I feel confident I can call it walking. Or at least a controlled wobbling that can carry her the length and width of any given room. One of her favorite things at the moment is walking into people, which can bet quite jarring if you're trying to watch The Daily Show and she comes at you from your blind spot.

Sam is also walking fine, but being 4 years old this probably isn't really noteworthy. She seems to be focusing all her recent mental might into asking questions about everything she sees and hears. Every time we use a colloquialism like "hold your horses" or "in for a penny, in for a pound" she stops the conversation in its tracks (even if she wasn't really part of it to begin with) and asks what THAT means. She has also recently demanded of me impromptu dissertations on what causes shadows and why we grow scabs over scrapes.

The scab thing we seemed to grasp when I explained that it was like growing a band-aid to keep the wound clean, but she just couldn't seem to grok shadows. And you know what? It's kind of IS hard to explain once your audience asks you to move beyond the declarative statement that "things block the light and cause shadows." I think she was trying to over think it, but a few demonstrations with a flashlight and index card seemed to help her out and now she promises to field this one when Mandy asks in a couple of years.

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Tags: Amanda, Bad Behavior, Parenting, Samantha