Seeing things

Finn asked me to use my finger to make the popping noise on the inside of my cheek. His response when I did it: "I see that sound!"

One of Finn's most used phrases: "Oh, I didn't see that before," which half of the time translates into "Oh, you're showing me something brand new and really interesting" and the other half of the time translates into "Oh, it was there all along but I didn't see it."

Theory of mind... here we come!

Today I got some nice, explicit evidence that Finn is getting theory of mind. Theory of mind is a really cool cognitive (or even social cognitive) ability. It has to do with being able to understand that other people out there have minds, just like you do, but that their minds are separate from yours. Young children don't have this yet, as shown by the fact that they will often assume that you know what they know, even if it's pretty clear you don't. Like they might ask you who gave them the cookie, even though you weren't there when it was given to them and, if asked, they would correctly be able to say that you weren't there. Still, they assume you must know, because they know (why kids constantly ask questions that they already know the answer to is an entirely different question and a complete mystery, to me anyway!).

So this morning I was sitting at the dining room table with Finn. We were both eating breakfast, and the TV was on in the other room (sad to say, but this is a frequent occurrence during our meals). The way our living room/dining room is laid out, there is a very open (but not completely nonexistent) wall between the two, and from Finn's seat you can see the TV but from my seat there is wall/closet in the way. In the context of talking about what was on, Finn said to me, "I can see the TV, but you can't."

"YES! THAT'S RIGHT!" I said back to him. Ok, so maybe I didn't actually scream it, but I'm sure I said it with gushing enthusiasm and pride, because I recognized right away that a cool new connection was charging itself up in his head.

Oh, and can I also mention that I am unabashedly proud of the fact that Finn knows what a brain is and where it goes. I ask him to show people (Grandma and Grandpa, for example) where his brain is, and he patiently points yet again to his head. That's MY boy!

Man, my kids must think I'm absolutely insane sometimes! Oh well.

Motor oddities

When Finn was a baby, he used to do this funny movement with both of his hands. It was sort of a spastic wiggling of the fingers (kind of like "jazz hands", if you're familiar with that reference). I can't remember exactly when we first noticed it, but it was a feature of his baby life for quite a while. We used to call it his "schizophrenia" hands--no disrespect meant to people with schizophrenia, but it looked a lot like the hand movements (or you might call them tics) that Brad Pitt used when playing a person with schizophrenia in 12 Monkeys. We wondered time and time again what on earth the movements were about. Very few people had ever seen that kind of movement before on other babies. My sister-in-law once said that one of her girls had done something similar, but I don't know if that was really the same persistent behavior or just a one time thing in that case.

I had one theory about what it might be. As adults, our brains are organized so that the right half of our brain controls the left half of our body, and vice versa. However, I discovered that in babies this kind of brain organization is not set up initially. In fact, it apparently takes about a year and a half or so for that organization to set in, so I wondered if Finn's funny hand movements might have to do with the two sides of the brain competing for control over his hands until the organization was fully worked out. It sounds like a perfectly good explanation to me... only trouble is, why would that just be true for Finn and not everyone else? I guess we'll never know. He eventually moved past it and now his hand movements are perfectly normal--in fact, I would even venture to say that he had very good fine motor control of his fingers pretty early on. That's in stark contrast to his gross motor movement... he didn't start walking until 18 months! He barely crawled before that, too. One day he just seemed to decide that walking would be a good thing to start now, and off he went.


Kate (now 4 1/2 months) has started doing something interesting with her hand movements, too, but it's something more common (at least in my experience... both my kids did it, and I think I've seen other babies do it too). When she's nursing, she will sometimes sort of flail her arms around. It's not completely wild, but also not a very controlled movement, and she has some force behind it (but not so much that it's disruptive to her nursing). What I find interesting about it is how it ties in with the nursing. It almost seems like it's an expression of effort... like maybe there are times when her sucking is not working as much as she'd like and she's putting her whole body into the activity. I can't explain it much better than that, but it's really interesting to watch. She's not distressed, but she sometimes seems to be working hard, like maybe she just wants to get done nursing faster than she is really able to, so she's trying to move the process along. Either that or she thinks my breasts are bongo drums.

She is old enough now that she would often rather be paying attention to the world instead of nursing. This happens to every nursing mom I know--she wants to eat, but she also wants to look around, so your nipple becomes the key object in a biological taffy pull. Ouch! Not fun! But they look up at you with such pleasant wonder in their eyes, you can't really be annoyed at them. Score one for Kate and for all babykind!

Visions of sugar donuts

My folks are visiting this week. When they come to visit, they stay in a hotel just a few miles north of our house, and there is a Dunkin Donuts along the way to our house from the hotel. It's been something of a tradition for them to stop and pick up donuts on the way to our house in the morning, maybe not every day they're here, but often once or twice. Finn definitely associates their visits with getting donuts (one of the benefits of a being a grandparent is being associated with sugary goodness). Today we got a little window into the way Finn sees the world. It was time for his nap, and Grandma was also going to go back to the hotel to take a nap for a bit. When his daddy told him on the way up to bed that Grandma was going back to the hotel, apparently Finn said "The donut hotel?"

Now I'm having visions of a hotel made out of giant donuts.

It occurs to me that Finn's perspective must be more complicated than this, because he knows full well where the Dunkin Donuts is. He tends to point it out every time we drive by it on the way to the grocery store.

-"The donut store!"
-"Uh-huh, that's right." Thanks kiddo; very considerate of you to point it out to us... again... for our own sakes, no doubt.

One thing old and one thing new

As a cognitive psychologist, I love listening to the language quirks in Finn's everyday chatter. He makes the kinds of classic mistakes when talking that, when you know what you're looking for, you can see are signs of his language skills getting better. The errors themselves show that his language is developing and becoming more like that of an adult. For example, he tends to over-extend his past tense "ed" rule. One of my favorites is when he is playing a video game where his character gets knocked over or out by another character he says "He falled me down." This is two errors in one: 1) the error of saying "falled" instead of "fell", which means he is internalizing the rule about past tense and extends it to irregular verbs that it doesn't belong with (some cognitive psychologists don't believe kids have an actual internal rule, though, but it's too complicated to go into the actual theory here... and I suppose anyone who's not a dorky cognitive psychologist, like myself, wouldn't find it very interesting. It really is a cool theory, though!), and 2) the error of using "fall" as a transitive verb (I don't actually know what this means linguistically). He makes the "ed" error with some other words, but I find this phrase the cutest. He's usually not upset-sometimes he says it with a bit of resignation, but always with a perfectly calm acceptance of that aspect of the game.

That was the old... he's been doing that for a while. Here's the new. The other day Finn was able to, for the first time I've been able to catch it, really explain how he was feeling deep down in a way that didn't just rely on a standard label, like "I'm sad" or "I'm mad". He tends not to be able to explain why he gets upset. The actual process of getting upset sort of short-circuits his thinking, I believe, so that by the time you get him calmed down, he doesn't have the ability to tap into what the problem had been at that time, at least not in words. Well, the other day Finn and his daddy went to the basketball court and brought his little basketball with them. When they came back, Finn was very upset (I could hear him crying about a block and a half away, since the front door was open). His daddy was also very upset; they were both clearly very frustrated, and it escalated into a time-out for hitting or some such. At any rate, I didn't get a chance to talk to Finn about it right away, but his daddy told me the gist of the story:

They had been playing basketball at the court, which had turned into Hubby shooting the ball and Finn fetching it after (Finn has little patience with shooting the ball himself for very long since he can't come close to the basket, so he likes to watch his daddy shoot). Then they started kicking the ball around. They were playing a soccer-esque game of kick, where they would race to the ball together, each trying to reach it first. Hubby would reach it first most of the time and kick it away from Finn, at which point Finn would laugh and run after it again. It was a perfectly happy game, and there was no gradual sign of Finn becoming upset. Suddenly he just sat down and wouldn't play and got sulky and eventually started to cry (or maybe that didn't start until after Hubby picked him up and started to carry him home). The key points being that Finn seemed to be enjoying the game of kick even though it essentially was like a game of "keep-away" from him, and that he didn't gradually melt down but suddenly was upset.

When I heard the story, I suspected that Finn had been frustrated because his daddy kept kicking the ball away from him. Hubby is not really into the "let him win because he's little" philosophy, but I should also say that I'm sure he was right that Finn seemed to be having a perfectly happy time throughout all of this. It wasn't a case of daddy being a meanie... it's just that Finn didn't realize he was frustrated until it was too late. I have that kind of frustration/anger myself sometimes; it boils up so gradually that you don't even notice it until you're ready to breath fire.

Anyway, typically when I would ask Finn about something like this ("What happened, sweetie? What made you feel frustrated or sad?"), he can't really give me an in-depth sense of his own feelings or thoughts. He usually applies a patented label, or can only pseudo-confirm or refute statements I make myself--like I might say, "Did you get frustrated when the ball kept rolling away?" and he would nod or say "uh-huh". I call this "pseudo"-confirmation because Finn is still inclined to say yes to all of your statements to him, even when they don't really apply to the situation. But I thought I should try to ask him what happened anyway, and this is what he said:

"I didn't kick the ball. Daddy kicked it 2 times, and he kicked it 4 times, and I didn't kick it."

I was floored! First of all, this was several hours later, and Finn doesn't usually retain events in much detail for very long. Secondly, this was an incredibly potent and easily understood rendition of what must have been going on in his head at the time. Nobody asked him specifically what he was thinking at the moment (or if his daddy did ask, I'm sure he was too upset to convey it), so he was telling me now what had been in his head earlier. For some 3-year-olds this might not be a big deal, but Finn doesn't communicate his frustrations verbally very well, so this was really a break-through! I was so amazed and really quite excited at the development that I think this must reflect on his part. I didn't press him further because I didn't want him to feel upset again, and really he had told me everything I needed to know. But I did sneak over to Hubby, who was laying down in the other room, and told him exactly what Finn had said--not to make a big deal of the incident itself, but to show him how Finn was able to get the emotion across.

Funny things

Things that Finn finds funny:

Standing on his head or being held upside down. I wonder what the biological basis is for this... it seems almost universal that being upside down is funny for kids.

Playing "squeeze" (a game invented by Grandma, I believe) - Here are the rules of the current instatiation of the game: First, Finn sits or stands behind you as you sit on a sofa (you have to lean forward to let him in). Then, you sit back and smoosh him against the back of the sofa and say "Squeeeeeeeeze." The first version of the game was just a hugging game, but this is what it has evolved into.

Making funny faces, including "smooshy face" (where you push your hands in on your face to make your mouth all smooshed up). Other versions: "funny face" (which involves squeezing your cheeks between your fingers and thumbs), "clown face" (otherwise known by daddy/hubby as "crazy clown face", which creeps him out totally, but Finn loves it), and googly-eyes (which involves making a surprised expression and then rolling your eyes around and around (a la James the engine, from Thomas and friends).

Readings stories or reciting nursery rhymes and replacing random words (usually nouns) with the word "Chicken". For example: Row, row, row your boat, gently down the chicken

The knock-knock banana/orange joke. For those of you who are sadly uninformed:

>Knock-knock
-Who's there?
>Banana
-Banana who?
>Knock-knock
-Who's there?
>Banana
-Banana who?
>Knock-knock
-Who's there?
>Orange?
-Orange who?
>Orange you glad I didn't say banana?

You'd think nobody had ever invented a funnier joke. Finn can only handle playing the door-answerer part, but he puts the appropriate inflection in to every line. He gets more and more pretend-exasperated as you go (he starts to get a little over-exasperated if you do too many "bananas" - two is enough; any more and he seems a bit thrown off). His exasperation hits its peak at "Orange who?" which he says in a really funny, drawn-out, high-pitched questioning voice. It's the same tone he uses when he says "Cats?!" (read the previous post--none of us could remember exactly how the Cats thing started, though).


Finn will often talk in the most amazing voice when he's amused-- it's like you can hear pure laughter channeling through his voice; his enjoyment is so raw and untainted. I wish I could bottle it... it would be the new fountain of youth, I think.

I also wish I could post a picture that would match the laughing side of Finn, but as I look through all my pics, I realize that we never capture him honestly laughing. It's always a posed smile. He's perfectly happy smiling for the camera, but it's just not the same. We have a number of pics of him crying though. What a shame that it's so easy to capture real sadness and so hard to capture real happiness with a camera.

Ok... this one won't really mean much of anything except to myself, my hubby, Finn, and my bro and his family... but just so I don't give myself the chance to forget...

CATS?!

Just time for a quick post

In line with my resolution, I will sometimes post really quick things, because if I wait until I have lots of time, it just may not happen.



First thing... I actually lied a little bit, unintentionally of course. I did have another blog once, but...1) I barely used it, so it doesn't count, and 2) It is associated in my mind with some unpleasant disagreements with my bro... so perhaps I repressed it. At any rate, I still feel very awkward and behind the curve when it comes to writing in this thing, and it definitely feels out of place to say "blogging" (or any other verb derivative of the word blog) in reference to myself. So I proclaim myself a blogging virgin despite my previous experience.



Second, and more importantly, adding some more memories.



The other day when we were all driving somewhere together and my husband and I were nitpicking and bitching at each other for perfectly stupid reason, I'm sure, Finn piped up from the back seat and said: "Mommy... Daddy... relax!" It was one of the most hysterical things I've ever heard, this little 3-year-old, capable of throwing one heck of a tantrum at the drop of a hat, telling us to relax. It worked immediately, too, because we were both so thrown and it was so funny that we couldn't be pissy with each other any more. He still says it occasionally; luckily not too often, because I think the tension-breaking effect would go away if he said it too much.

I'm going to try and remember the older memories from Finn's 3 years, if I can. It's hard. They fall away so fast. Here's one of the first talking memories I have for Finn... when he was only just starting to talk--only had about 5 or 10 words, so maybe about 20 months, give or take a month or two (it's so bad that I can't even remember those kinds of details)--Finn was in his car seat and was saying "Ba-oh" over and over again. I was in the passenger seat, and I turned around and said "Where, Finn? I don't see a ball!" and I looked and looked and couldn't find the ball he was trying to tell me about. Finally, I reached my hand around on the floor behind my back seat and pulled out an empty water bottle. It took me a second longer, and then I realized that he was saying "bottle" the whole time. That was a cool memory, because it was the first time that he was really meaning something very specific and it was a persistent meaning... he was sure there was a "ba-oh" there, and if only mommy could figure it out she could confirm that indeed that "ba-oh" was right there. Luckily, I did figure it out! Language development rocks!