The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

One might suppose that with babies sprawling, creeping, and toddling on every hand, we should not lack evidence on the beginnings of human locomotion; but as a matter of fact, the stage that precedes walking is involved in a good deal of confusion. Records are scanty, and children seem to vary a good deal in their way of going at the thing. Most of them “creep before they gang”; but there seems to be a stage before creeping, when, if the child is given full freedom of movement, he will get over the floor in some cruder way, rolling, hitching, dragging himself by the elbows, humping forward measure-worm fashion, or wriggling along like a snake. Perhaps, as I have already suggested, this is because skirts delay the natural beginning of creeping, and these other movements require less freedom of the legs; perhaps there is some deeper reason connected with race history. Sometimes the baby makes these less efficient movements answer till walking is acquired, and never creeps at all.

Our baby, as we have seen, had already made her first ineffective attempts to pull herself forward and reach something; and lying face down, unable to turn over, had so propped herself with hands and knees that when she tried to move she almost stumbled on creeping unawares. But soon after she was six months old, she discovered the other half of the trick of rolling—reversing herself from front to rear as well as from rear to front; and this gave her such an enlarged freedom that it stopped all aspirations in other directions.

She did not deliberately turn over and over to get anywhere. She simply rolled and kicked about the floor, turning over when she felt like it or when she wished to reach something, highly content, and asking odds of nobody. If by chance she turned in the same direction a number of times in succession, she would drift halfway across the room, meeting no end of interesting things by the way—mamma’s slipper tips, chair rockers, table legs, waste basket, petals dropped from the vases, and so on. It was a great enlargement of life, and kept her happy for six or seven weeks.

During this time, her balance in sitting grew secure, so that she could sit on the floor as long as she chose, occupied with playthings; but she cared more for the rolling.

It was in these weeks, too, that two great new interests came into our baby’s life. The first was a really passionate one, and it seized her suddenly, the week after she was half a year old. The door had just opened to admit a guest, amid a bustle of welcome, when a cry of such desire as we had never heard from our baby in all her little life called our attention to her. Utterly indifferent to the arrival of company (she who had always loved a stir of coming and going, and taken more interest in people than in anything else!) she was leaning and looking out of the window at the dog, as if she had never seen him before—though he had been before her eyes all her life. She would think of nothing else; the guest, expert in charming babies, could not get a glance.

Day after day, for weeks, the little thing was filled with excitement at sight of the shaggy Muzhik, moving her arms and body, and crying out with what seemed intensest joy and longing. When he came near, her excitement increased, and she reached out and caught at him; her face lighted with happiness when he stood close by; she showed not the least fear when he put his rough head almost in her face, but gazed earnestly at it; she watched for him at the window, or from her baby carriage. No person or thing had ever interested her so much. Muzhik, on his part, soon learned to give the snatching little hands a wide berth; and his caution may have enhanced his charm.

Later in the month, she showed somewhat similar excitement at sight of a cow. About the same time, too, she first noticed the pigeons as they flew up from the ground.

This was the beginning of a lasting interest in animals, animal pictures, animal stories. It is not easy to account fully for this interest, appearing in such intense degree, at so early an age. All children show it to some extent, though in many it is mingled with a good, deal of fear. One is tempted to connect both the fear and the interest with race history—the intimate association of primitive man with animals; but a six-month baby is traversing a period of development far earlier than that of the primitive hunter. Professor Sully has some good suggestions about the sympathy between children and animals, but these, too, fail of application to a baby so young. Probably to her the main charm was the movement, the rough resemblance to people, joined with so many differences, now first noticed with the interest of novelty—and (as later incidents made me suspect) the quantity of convenient hair to be pulled.

The other new interest waked late in the seventh month: that joy in outdoors that was for many months of the little one’s life her best happiness. Up to this time, she had liked to be taken out in her baby carriage, but mainly for the motion. Now, one morning, grandma took her and sat down quietly on the veranda, saying that she wanted her to learn to love the sunshine, the birds and flowers and trees, without needing the baby carriage and its motion. The little one sat in her lap, looking about with murmurs of delight; and after that, her happiness in rolling about freely was much greater when we spread a blanket on veranda or lawn, and laid her there. Within two weeks, she would coax to be taken outdoors, and then coax till she was put down out of arms, and left to her own happiness. She would roll about by the hour, the most contented baby in the world, breaking occasionally into cries and movements of overflowing joy.

I did not think that at this age the novel sights and sounds outdoors had much to do with her pleasure; she did not yet notice them much. Nor could it have been the wideness and freedom of outlook, for she had not yet come to distant seeing—a hundred feet was as far as I had ever seen her look. Later, all this counted; but now I thought that the mere physical effect of activity in the fresh air, together with the bright light, and perhaps the moving and playing of lights in the leaves, must make up most of the charm.