New Cognitive Milestone

Adam is almost 19 months now. One of the areas kids this age start developing is in the mental land of make believe. I think Adam picks up a lot of his make believe play from daycare and the older preschoolers that attend. Pretending isn’t new to him, though. He started pushing around everything he could find pretending that it was a car when he was 10 months old. He even added “vrrrooom” noises. Everything became a car at that point. Books, shoes, even, amusingly, a grilled cheese sandwich during lunch time.

But he has recently become more sophisticated. He can now form mental categories of “things you feed” and “things you don’t”. So all dolls and pictures of people are given things to eat and drink and since they can’t make eating and drinking noises on their own, he provides them. The other day as I was sitting at my computer, he found an old mouse pad with DH’s picture on it. It was taken in the pre-Jenny era of DH’s life (also known as the “independent days”). DH was sitting smiling on his first motorcycle, which was cherry red and perfectly polished. “Daddy! Daddy!” Adam exclaimed. It was cute that he recognized his dad, a fact I found surprising since, to me, given our 4 years of moving, buying houses, trading in cars, accumulating debt, having kids, etc., DH looks very little today like he did in that picture. Then again, there are times when Adam calls just about anyone “Daddy”, including, inexplicably, some of the men from The Wiggles (who, and I will take a lie detector test verifying such, I have never met).

I thought it might end there. But he disappeared for a few seconds and came back and sat down next to the mouse pad (which was on the floor). I didn’t pay much attention until I heard him say “there go”, which is his way of saying “there you go”. It’s pretty cute when he says it, but it can often be a signal of danger for me since it usually means he’s giving something to the dog that he’s not supposed to. So I looked over to see him feeding DH’s picture dog food. He had a fistful of kibble and was doling it out one bit at a time to DH’s smiling, unaware face sitting happily on his motorcycle. To be fair, he did lean over and give it a kiss, too. And then took his pacifier out of his mouth and shared it with DH’s picture. The pacifier, of course, was larger than DH’s head in the picture. Certainly big enough to make riding difficult.

I have to say, this picture was very well taken care of. I’m afraid of him taking such good care of his little infant sister when she comes home in about a week, though. “There go!” will certainly arouse a lot more panic on my part, that’s for sure. I just hope Natasha doesn’t have the same affinity for dog food that Adam does. I’m afraid the girl will be provided plenty of opportunities to eat it.

Adam resting happily in his old baby hammock, which has recently been hauled out for Natasha.