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!