The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

To go back to those swift four days in which the baby came into realization of her power of using hands and eyes together,—they had been preceded by a marked advance in the use of eyes alone (or jointly with the sense of motion in being carried about) to get the relations of things about her more clearly arranged in her mind. The day before the baby held up her rattle to look at, she had declined to go to sleep in her mother’s arms, and kept lifting her head to look at me, till I crossed the room and put myself out of sight. Presently she lifted her head again, turned round, and searched persistently the quarter of the room toward which she had seen me disappear. She had gained much in sense of direction and in association of ideas when she could look along the line in which I had been seen to move moments before, expecting to see me somewhere there.

Later, the same day, she sat in my lap, watching with an intent and puzzled face the back and side of her grandmother’s head. Grandma turned from her knitting and chirruped to her, and the little one’s jaw dropped and her eyebrows went up with an expression of blank surprise. Presently I began to swing her on my foot, and at every pause in the swinging she would sit gazing at the puzzling head till grandma turned, and nodded or chirruped to her; then she would turn away satisfied and want more swinging.

Here we seem to get a glimpse of the process I have spoken of, by which the baby gradually associates together the front and rear and side aspects of a person or thing, till at last they coalesce together in his mind as all one object. At first amazed to see the coil of silver hair and the curve of cheek turn suddenly into grandma’s front face, the baby watched for the repetition of the miracle till it came to seem natural, and the two aspects were firmly knit together in her mind.

She began, too, to watch people’s motions carefully for long spaces of time—all through the process of setting the table, for instance—with a serious little face, and an attention so absorbed that it was hardly possible to divert her if one tried (which one ought not to do, for power of attention is a precious attainment, and people have no business to meddle with its growth for their own amusement). When her mother’s dark-eyed sister had a little reception in consequence of having married the minister, baby was in the thick of it, watching first the preparations, and then the comings and goings of people, with the closest attention and the deepest enjoyment, cheerfully willing to have her meals postponed, her nap broken, anything, if the fun would only go on.

There was a decided advance, too, in her acquaintance with her own body. Sitting as usual in her horse-collar, she was bending herself back over it, a thing that she had done before; but to-day she kept it up so persistently, and bent herself back with such exertion, that at last the back of her head touched the floor. She righted herself with an expression of great surprise. Evidently she had been experimenting in new muscular sensations only, and (as happens to all experimenters sometimes) had got an extra result that she did not bargain for and did not understand. She bent back again, with her head screwed around to see what had given her the touch. In this position, she did not reach the floor. She sat up again, looked at me with a perplexed face, and tried it over, a full dozen times, till her mother picked her up to stop it, on the ground that the baby was more valuable than the experiment, and that she would break her little back. For days, however, the baby returned to the investigation, doubling herself back over the arm of any one who held her till her head hung straight down, or over the horse-collar till it rested on the floor.

We may perhaps fairly guess that in this incident she had for the first time discovered the back of her head as a part of herself, and any of us might well be surprised to find himself extending off behind into space that way, if he had never known about it before. The baby had of course felt daily and hourly touches on the back of her head, from pillow and floor and lap, from cap and hair brush; but all her previous behavior, and her surprise now, indicate that this was the first time she had externalized these touches—which implies also the first time she had felt herself as receiving them.

One of the first things she did when she began grasping zealously was to seize her own toes, and she bent her foot forward on the ankle to bring it better in reach. This may have been a purely instinctive coöperating act at first, but it helped on the control of feet and legs, and the recognition of them as parts of herself—the more as they were now for some time favorite playthings every time the baby was undressed.

Another significant movement the next day, also brought about by the advance in grasping, was the first attempt to scramble forward as she lay on her stomach, to get hold of something—a futile effort, but the forerunner of creeping.

These days of rapid unfolding were joyous days. The baby laughed aloud more than ever before, and her daily frolics were as necessary to her as her meals, and were fretted for as persistently if she did not get them. The door of communion with fellow beings, too, was trembling on its hinges, ready to come ajar. The little thing began to look up into our faces as if for sympathy in pleasure or perplexity, as I have mentioned in the case of her surprise at discovering the back of her head; she did it laughing when she splashed in the bath, and with smiles of satisfaction when she listened to the piano. When her mother held out her arms to take her, she learned to put forward her little hands in response; and on the same day she took up the instinctive gesture of stretching out her arms toward an object in desire—always, I suspect (records are wanting), the next gesture after turning away the head. Neither of these reaching gestures was as yet used intentionally to convey ideas, but both entered later into genuine sign language. Both seem to grow naturally out of grasping movements.

In the baby’s absorption in grasping, most of her little sounds were abandoned; but she clung to a favorite long gurgle, and used it with an air of amiable response when people talked or nodded to her, often kicking her legs in the air or flinging up her arms, by way of emphasis. Sometimes she would look earnestly into your face and address you with the gurgle in all seriousness. Sometimes it would seem to occur to her suddenly, and she would burst out with it, with an impulsive movement of body and limbs.