Trying to figure out kids' brains, one blog post at a time.

Abs doing some serious work on finding out what exactly the brown bear sees. (Spoiler! It's a red bird.)

Tonight during dinner at Papa's house, Abby was squandering some time playing with a magnetic board. It's white, and it comes with some plastic shapes that stick to it. As I watched her, she put all the shapes on the board one at a time. When they were all up there, she reached for an unrelated clear plastic bag and pressed it to the board. I watched her face become confused, ever so briefly, when it failed to stick to where she'd put it.

This began my thinking about the assumptions kids make at this age. I'm fairly certain, unless they've been doing some extraneous reading late at night (and it is true that I've found some books in the cribs), that they have no clear working knowledge on the science of magnetism. Yet, when they tinker with toys that feature a heavy usage of those principles, there is never any alarm at what has occured.

"Holy crap, Dad, " they ought to say, "I just put that monkey on the fridge door and he stayed there! He's just HANGING THERE! With a complete disregard to gravity, which seems to work with everything else! What gives?"

Is Abby wrong to think that, since all those shapes stuck like magic to the board, so would another random object? Would it not stand to reason, then, that they should reasonably expect to have the ability to press random objects to vertical faces of anything else (ie, the wall, the dresser, the dog) and have them stick there? Sometimes I wonder if things like this have an adverse effect on their learning process. To be truthful, I think I've actually seen them trying this with crayons on the wall. Or could it just be that they're trying to draw on the wall? Nah.

Also, this is what's so infuriating with kids: it's impossible to impress them. Magnetism is treated as commonplace. Television and electricity get no special regard. But pick them up by the ankles and dangle them a couple feet from the ground, though, and you're like a god.

For some reason, this train of thought makes me think of that part in Dumb and Dumber, where Jim Carrey sees the framed newspaper article from 1969 about man landing on the moon and says, "That's great...we landed on the moon!" It's a state of being strangely unaware of progress. When the girls see an airplane roaring overhead, I still expect them every time to say, "Yay!! We've mastered the art of flight! What a world!" As if they should be somehow aware of mankind's thousands of years of failing in this regard, and should celebrate it appropriately.

I'm eager for the next few years, when they will finally be able to tell me what they were thinking when they were 21 months old.

Day two hundred and eighty two.

Sunny buddy.

Is she trying to do a Spock hand gesture here?