The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

Now began a period of diligent self-training in standing. As I sat on the grass and the baby played beside me, she would put her hands on my knee, lift herself to her feet, and balance on them as long as she could—seven seconds at the most, in the second week of the month, a quarter of a minute in the third, if her attention was called away from her own balance by some interesting sight. She would totter, stretch out her arms to recover her balance, circle with them just as we do (the movement must be highly instinctive), come down with a jolt and a peal of baby laughter, scramble to my knees, and up again. People are foolish to go to the matinée for amusement if they have a chance, instead, to sit flat on a lawn on a summer day, and assist at a baby’s standing lessons.

In these days there was evident again an intangible but great increase in the little one’s mental alertness, her eager curiosity in following our movements, her look of effort to understand, her growing clearness in grouping associations and interpreting what she saw.

Her handling of things had long developed into elaborate investigation, turning an object over and examining every side, poking her fingers into crevices, opening and shutting lids, turning over the leaves of books; and now she was no longer satisfied with investigating such objects as she came across by chance—she began to have a passion (which increased for weeks and months, and long made up a great part of her life) to go and find what there was to see. She crept to the window and stood at the low sill, to look out, beating the pane with her soft little hands and laughing in an ecstasy of delight if the dog wandered by. She crept into the hall and explored it, sitting down in each corner to take a survey, and to look up the walls above her. Her toys were neglected; she was impatient of being held in arms, and eager only to get to the floor and use her new powers. She crept happily about for hours from chair to chair, from person to person, getting to her feet at each, and setting herself cleverly down again; smiling and crowing at each success, and coming to us for applause and caresses. She did not want to leave the floor for her meals, and was reconciled to them only if she might stand at her mother’s side and take her milk or porridge in small doses, interspersed with play. She ran away from us on hands and knees, laughing, if she thought we were about to pick her up.

Outdoors her happiness was even greater than in the month before, and her cries of rapture as she looked up, down, and around, and realized her own activity in the midst of all the waving and shining and blooming things, were remarkable—uttered, as it were, from the very deeps of her little soul, with that impassioned straining of the central muscles by which a baby throws such abandon of longing or ecstasy into his voice. We seem to have lost the vivid expressiveness of primitive cries in getting the precision and convenience of articulate words.

The sights and sounds of outdoors now contributed greatly to the little girl’s joy there. She had for some weeks noticed sounds more than ever before—the tapping of a woodpecker, for instance, or the stamping of a horse in the stable—and now she was quick to look and listen at the note of a bird. She watched the birds, too, for the first time, as they flew from tree to tree; and the profuse California flowers were objects of incessant desire and pleasure.

The power of communication was considerably increased in this month by the acquisition of one exceedingly useful sign. The way in which it was developed is an interesting example of the evolution of such signs. First the baby began to use her forefinger tip for specially close investigations; at the same time she had a habit of stretching out her hand towards any object that interested her—by association, no doubt, with touching and seizing movements. Combining these two habits, she began to hold her forefinger separate from the others when she thus threw out her hand towards an interesting object; then, in the second week of the month, she directed this finger alone towards what interested her; and by the third week, the gesture of pointing was fairly in use. She pointed to the woodshed door, with her mewing cry, when she wished to see the kittens; to the garden door, with pleading sounds, when she wished to be taken thither; to the special bush from which she wished a rose. She pointed in answer, instead of merely looking, when we asked, “Where is grandpa?” “Where is Muzhik?”

These questions can hardly have been understood, as questions; but it was more than ever clear that she got some idea from a good deal that we said, and now by the words alone, without the help of gestures. Doubtless she knew several simple words—words of coming and going, of food, of the kittens and the dog and the horse.

All this time she had shown no great improvement in walking movements when held from above, and she had no particular ambition to walk. But in the last week of the month she began to edge along by the side of a chair, holding to it—a great advance.

The first attempts at climbing, too, appeared before she was quite ten months old. In the third week of the tenth month the baby had let herself down by her hands quite cleverly from a large chair in which she had been scrambling about—a feat that must have been quite instinctive, since she did it well and easily at the first try. The last day of the month, as she hovered at the foot of the stairs (a region about which she had much unsatisfied curiosity), some one helped her to put her knee on the lower step. Thereupon she laid hold on the next one, and pulled herself up, and with the same help, mounted two steps more. At this point her aunty’s stereotyped appeal, “Don’t help her! let her alone, and let me see what she will do!” prevailed. A candle was set on a higher step as a lure, and, sure enough, the little thing, unaided, set her knee on the higher level, laid hold with her hands, and drew herself up. It is significant that true climbing movements should be so early and so easily caught at a single partial lesson; and I shall have occasion to say more about it before the story of the baby’s first year closes.

In the very last days of the tenth month came a wonderful spring upward in the little one’s intelligence about her surroundings, and in her power of communicating with us. It involved the real beginning of spoken words—for the cat cry of the month before remained by itself, leading to nothing more, and though it was the first sound that expressed an idea, it was not from it, but from this later root, that spoken language sprang and grew.