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NOTE
A running list of offhand observations about my niece as she grows up. Besides being the best she’s really so interesting!
- The feet/toes are an untapped expressive device. A baby always tends to have their feet exposed. They will wiggle with glee, and shake and twist all reactive and expressive. We hide our expression, and we hide our feet. With Eva I can see directly how she’s feeling, often just by her feet showing joy. At some point, this is lost.
- Eva will pick up an object and say to me “what is?” which is asking me what it is. Often it’ll be an object that I interact with often, or it could be something strange. For example she asked me “what is?” and held this pom-pom type of cat toy. I didn’t know what it was. I realize I walk around and don’t know the proper names of things.
- Children books can be very simple, but profound and with lessons that I still must learn.
- Song is everywhere. Song is part of objects and learning. It seems every lesson presented to a child has an accompanying song, which will often persist into the real world when encountering the object outside of the media.
- Eva will have difficulty with classification, but I feel it is just because I have a strict, socially constructed sense of things. Like when I am grouping objects, I’ll have a default criteria as an adult. She’s more freeform, or just doesn’t have the categories yet.
- As an example I’ll ask to count things, but what am I counting really? Am I counting objects or features of the objects. My own answer is only correct because of assumptions that I am making. (There are three cow toys, but also countable subgroups of two blue cows and one red cow)
- During development Eva will be a new person each time I see her. Each time there was a new ability gained.
- There is a sadness to this, where her development of language will eclipse previously endearing baby words. Like the future loss of “wawa” for water, or different emphasis of syllables.
- Also there can be instruction, but certain preferences for words are lost and can’t be controlled like an adult. For example, sometimes she’ll call me “Uncle Matty” but that has shifted to occasionally “Matthew” (picked up from my family). If “Matthew” eclipsed “Uncle Matty” there’s the sense it wouldn’t be retrievable till later.
- Eva does repeated actions. She’ll open this small chest door, remove the contents, put them back in, close the door, and repeat - endlessly. She recently unlocked “walking up the stairs” where she did the same thing - crawl up stairs, wait, climb down, repeat. But when I was watching her with her previous actions, I said to myself “in a way, walking up stairs, or “opening” stairs - stairs are a kind of door. Almost like a time dilated, stretched door.”
- While watching Youtube, Eva tried to peer around the corner of the window to see a character off screen. This makes perfect functional sense if the space were real but obviously not in a flat 2D space of the computer window. Virtual Space
- Similarly Eva was using the telephone. She heard a voice on it, and tried to respond. She searched for the voice on the other line in real space, and had a confused look. She then looked at the phone (this was a landline) and tried to kiss it.
- We have this hack for getting her off a topic. Say she wants to watch a children’s show, like Elmo. What we can say is “Elmo is sleeping” and that will stave off any further requests to turn on the Elmo show. This has warped into certain strange configurations, such as “the guitar is napping” and a time where Eva tried to wake it. “Wake up, wake up 123.”
- I will now die and truly know of things that I will never live to see that I want to see. Eva is just beginning life right now. I do not expect to live forever. She will see so many things that I will not.
- There’s a part of development that is kind of scary. I want to express things and conversation to her, and she has language but it still feels incomplete. Almost an The Uncanny Valley by Masahiro Mori moment.
- For example, she’ll take a pen from me while drawing and say both parts “thank you, your welcome” which I have trouble finding emotion in.
- Driving home Eva wanted to talk to my mom. She said “don’t forget me.”
- There’s a word that Eva uses when she doesn’t know the word for something and you ask her what it is. It sounds like “em-may” but nobody knows what it actually is.
- It sounds to me like a type of processing, “like a hmm” mixed with a “help me” but who knows?
- Eva’s social world is limited. The people she knows and has access to the names of is small, and will grow.
- But my world isn’t much larger. How many names do I even store in my mind? How many people do I think of in a day?
- Eva says “help you up” when referring to herself. There’s a difficulty in explaining the concept of “me” and “you” due to them swapping when speaking about yourself. A lot of her speech is based on mirroring and repetition.
- Eva, you must say “me” (which is actually “you”, that is, Eva)
- Experienced a new Eva sensation Sunday. I have this hand recorder and wanted to record some of Eva’s voice. Mel prompted her to sing, she did enthusiastically. Then I played it back for her, and she got bashful/shy, lowering her face and getting quiet. Total inversion of the proud performance.
- Eva had a first moment of creativity today and it struck me to the core.
- There’s the song “Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?” and she replaced “Dog” with “Mama”
- The past exists as “yesterday” because she doesn’t have any labels for the past (maybe too abstract a concept.)
- We do something an hour ago, “when did you do it? - yesterday.”
- Eva, at age two, often has a healthier, more mature response to problems than people who are grown adults.
- Obviously adult problems are more serious, but I am talking about adults with an inordinate negative focus on trivial events. Eva goes “it’s ok, no worries” and works through the problem, where I know adults who would be entirely disagreeable over a literal nothing.
- When Eva was younger and visiting I’d bring her to my room with for some Crackers and to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. I’d have this routine to say “Ok Google, Turn on Light” to turn on the light and as the light turned on I’d be met with this gleaming smile from her every time. We stopped doing this for a few months but I recently did it again. I said “Ok Google, Turn on Light” and waited for the smile but she was concerned with other things. It’s so silly and simple but in a way it made me sad. I’m sure she’ll develop in other ways that make her even more brilliant.
- I said to Eva “Draw a face” or any other object. I can see at times, vaguely, the correct positions of a face such as eyes. But they are also mostly scribbles and the practiced circles aren’t present. But she was very confident in her drawing and was able to say “that is a face” after. I know often I’ll draw something and fail in some way to “articulate” it and have to say what it was that I was attempting to draw.
- I drew an ant on the page with pronounced antenna. I said “this is an ant” and she tried to correct me “no, that’s a bunny.”
- Eva has opened me up to a new set of emotions and caring that I didn’t experience earlier. I react to certain pieces of things differently. It’s not that I didn’t feel in my heart these ways, and I feel I have always tried to be a good person throughout my life. But when I see an emotional scene, and I can somehow trace that to Eva it strikes me differently.
- I asked Eva how many idea she has a day. She said “four.” I asked her this because she has this habit of saying “Hmm. I have an idea” and I’ll enthusiastically ask to hear it, and then she says something like “Let’s play with the ball.” After telling me this, she then proceeded to have probably five more ideas within the next hour.
- Even though I took these limited notes I’m incapable of understanding the passage of growth of Eva. I’ll see videos of her as a chubby baby, without speech and say “When was she like this? I cannot recall her being like that.”
- We were outside and the wind was blowing. It’s chilly late March. Nearby windchimes rang, and Eva immediately goes “music” and does a silly dance with her eyes closed, and is then distracted by a bird in a nearby tree – “look.” In this moment, where it feels complexity is all around me, I am almost choked up by this simple message and understanding.
- We’ll hide words from her by spelling them out audibly i.e. C. A. N. D. Y.
- How does she interpret this shift into letters?
- When will this technique not work?
- I wear this hat with a ghost on it for Eva. She calls it ghost hat. It says “Boo” on it, besides having a ghost on it.
- I asked Eva what my hat says and she said “Boo” - which she couldn’t know because she cannot fully read yet to my knowledge. Though maybe she can?
- I asked her what her shirt said. I forget the text that was on it, but she said “Ms. Rachel”. Basically what she thought the shirt said was Ms. Rachel, when it was just an image of this show character Ms. Rachel.
- I can’t conclude she was wrong here fully though, but I like that concept that the shirt says what the image on it is.
- My closest friend Lynsey passed away and I found out midday. I had to watch Eva for a period in the late afternoon. On the drive over to watch her I had sunglasses on. I’d not spoken of this news to anyone. In my head I imagined the scene of me arriving, and these first words I would utter would come with the release of tears that I had been holding in. I could not speak.
- I thought of what Eva would think of me crying and her not understanding the reason, like this alphabetic phrase that she cannot understand now, because she cannot spell. I saw, in time over the months prior to this, Eva learning how to smile. I don’t understand fully why we lost Lynsey, or why I felt like crying but did not. I was just like Eva.
- When I got to the house, I did not cry as I expected. I took out my phone and opened up a picture of Lynsey, smiling. I showed it to Eva quietly, “That’s Lynsey.”