Rotational Dynamics and the Art of Button Pushing

My daughter has become a full-fledged participant in modern society…she has become a button pusher. I’m not convinced yet that she fully understands her actions…but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s doing it, nor does it distinguish her from the vast majority of button-pushers out there if you think about it.

There are two buttons that Norah has regular contact with. One is on a dangly, little, fish type thing on her play mat. When pressed, this button plays a 5 second clip of various nautical themed tunes. The second button is on her crib fish. This button also elicits music, but longer versions of keyboard rendered classical music with no apparent theme. On Friday, Moonshot announced that Norah had pressed the play mat button during one of her play sessions. However, since Norah’s hands and feet pretty much flail in all directions, my wife was willing to concede that the button pressing could well have been totally random. So we tried again on Saturday with MoMa in attendance. The little girl treated herself to sea-fairing ditties no less than six times in three or four minutes. We came again to the inescapable conclusion that our daughter is a genius.

Following directly on the heals of this button-pushing frenzy, Norah made a second, button-related advance. As parents who sleep with a baby monitor a few feet from our heads, we are used to keeping an ear trained on the faint background noise of the glorified walkie-talkie. We are accustomed to pulling ourselves from slumber upon hearing her small whimpers. We are even used to being jarred awake by the sounds of her electronically amplified wails. However, neither of us was prepared to be startled into wakefulness by poorly synthesized Beethoven at 3:43 AM. As our groggy brains tried to wrap themselves around the situation, we lay there in the dim light, staring at each other with utter confusion on our faces. The crib fish is mounted to the back side of the crib…well outside the reach of our immobile daughter. So even if she had applied her newfound understanding of the play mat button, she had no way of reaching the crib fish button. I will admit that many possibilities went through my imagination. I will further admit that many of them were supernatural. However, I was confident enough that there was some logical explanation for the music that I had no problem letting Moonshot go downstairs to investigate as I rolled back over. In my defense, I did keep an ear on things through the monitor.

Moonshot returned a short while later to explain that Norah had been lying within arms reach of the button and so clearly she was the presser. However, that still let the mystery of the baby rotation that allowed her to swing her arms into pressing position. While we were pretty sure she had somehow found a way to move herself about the crib, we opted instead to blame a newly arrived Nanny Ghost. We were excited at the possibility that we might be able to split the late night soothings three ways instead of two. “Go back to sleep, honey…it’s Nanny Ghost’s turn.” A parent’s dream come true, if you ask me.

A few hours later I awoke to the sounds of an excited Norah. This time, I stumbled down the steps to find her wiggling about the crib. The motion looked much like her past patternless thrashing, but clearly something was different because he had a slow but steady clockwise motion going on. She grinned and pumped her limbs as she sang a happy little song whose lyrics go a little something like this, “aaaaaoooooo ooooooaaaaaaa eeeeeee!!” And as she repeated this pattern, her wee hand moved closer and closer to that button. Alas, though I was thrilled at my daughter’s new talent, I was sad to abandon the wonderful possibilities presented by Nanny Ghost.

So here’s the tough thing about gauging infant advances. Though motion can be described, intent is very difficult to determine. Nothing described above was so clear as “Look at button, reach for button, press button, repeat.” Hands wave madly this way and that; eyes dart around from object to object. To a casual observer, she is the picture of random motion. But I have seen her develop…I know what random motion looks like and this is not random. It is frantic experimentation. It is a mad attempt to try everything she thinks might work with a few long shots thrown in for good measure. It is science in action. But the frequency with which she was able to find that small orange button makes it clear that she is in the process of crafting a system by which she can reliably supply herself with electronically produced music.

And that brings me to my final thought on this topic. The night after she first serenaded us with a baby-monitor concert, we were again awoke to baby-fied Beethoven. Again we found that she had rotated herself about the crib. But this time we were faced with the realization that this midnight music session could become a routine. And what to do then? Turn down the monitor to block out the noise but thereby miss her quiet whimpers? Remove the crib fish at night, thus depriving her of what is obviously a great incentive for her personal growth? Just accept the music as pat of our parenting experience? Luckily we get to postpone this decision. After that second time, she seems to have lost interest in rotational dynamics and button pushing of all sorts. She’s decided to work on grasping things instead. Buttons bore her this week. But soon she’ll be rolling about that crib and I’m thinking crib fish will have to sleep in the closet when that happens.


Thanks Simon
I’ve become lazy of late. In popular fashion, I’ve come up with excuse after excuse to explain why I haven’t jogged, lifted a weight, or really done anything more physical than bouncing my daughter in the past year or so. At first it was Moonshot’s pregnancy. She was nauseous through the first trimester and so needed to spend some quality time on the couch. Being the good husband that I am…I of course kept her company and made friends with our TV after years of ignoring it. By the third trimester Moonshot was achy and generally uncomfortable. The pattern of lounging continued. And now there is a baby in the house. I spend vast amounts of time on the couch giving her bottles, burping her, and playing with her. And even when I’m not the one holding her, I stick around my wife for solidarity’s sake. In addition, new parenthood has instilled in me the realization that sleep is priceless. I got used to getting out of bed only once Norah called. And as she slept later and later, I found myself sleeping later and later. Though one rolled out of bed at 5am to jog or lift weights or write in this blog, I now push my snooze button so late that I often find myself skipping breakfast, something I would never have done before.

So yesterday, my blog pal Simon posted on his fitness routine. As a fellow father of young’uns, I could not read his words without asking myself what exactly prevented me from doing the same.
And so, last night I set my alarm for 5am. And when that piercing tone jolted me awake this morning, I wanted nothing more than to roll back over and keep sleeping. But I realized that I really wanted to write in my blog that I got up and worked out. Odd as it sounds, the desire to write these words got me out from under those covers. So I lifted some weights, felt weak and worthless for the huge drop in my strength, and am now writing in this blog. Hopefully, by posting this here…I’ll feel guilted into doing it again on Monday.

A Quick Note on Visitors


Last weekend found two sets of visitors to the homestead. MoMa made her fourth trip up from Lake of the Ozarks and Uncle Goldwing and his wife Loretta spent all day Sunday with us as part of their weeklong U.S. circuit out of Jersey. This afternoon will find Taltap and Elsa moving into our guest bedroom for the weekend, making the 10-hour trip down from Minneapolis. Though this might not be of particular interest to many of you reading this, I wanted to take a few minutes to express how thankful Moonshot and I to all of you who have traveled so far to ooh and aah over our daughter (and to some small extent, to spend time with us as well). Those listed above are merely the most recent in a long list of people who keep logging many road hours for us.

We love you all.