I highly recommend The Scientist in the Crib, I think the author is Alison Gopnik. I read this book before we were even planning on Noah, so it’s not just interesting to parents. It’s all about how babies’ minds work, and how they manage to resolve such a flood of new stimuli into understanding about the world. The experiments they are doing to get inside babies’ heads these days are really sneaky. Babies are true empiricists, in that they never assume even the slightest thing about their world, because they don’t know anything to assume. So for example, when Noah was little, he never assumed that if I left, I would come back. He had to learn, after lots of panics, that I’ve come back every time so far.
So Noah’s been doing some science over the past week. He’s confirmed that every time he pushes the handle of the toilet, it makes a flushing sound. The good thing so far is he’s only been testing the toilet in the master bedroom, and he’s left the other ones alone. So who know if those other toilet handles do anything- he hasn’t decided yet. He’s also proven that the light switch near his changing table will turn the lights out in his room, though they don’t seem to turn on all the time. And he has a lot of work to still on his Theory of Gravity- making sure toys always fall when he drops them, and that gravity applies to each thing he can hold. Which is fair- there are things that seem immune to gravity, like the curtains, so he has to really do a lot of research.
Unfortunately, he also discovered today how to lift the lid on the toilet. He loves sticking his hands in toilet water, so this means either no bathroom play, or toilet locks…I don’t like either of those ideas, but I also don’t like babies with toilet hands.
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