Sunday, April 09, 2006
Associations
I remember writing one day on this weblog, that in the beginning I was wondering whether I would be able to write something new about Mylène every day, if I had the time. After six months I can say now: yes ... IF I had the time, I could write something new every day. Sadly though, time goes by so quickly, that before a new development has been written down in a post, other developments that are worth writing about have already followed.
Time to catch up with some old new developments.
A few weeks ago, we noticed that Mylène started to make associations between events or occurrences. I noticed this for the first time, when I was changing her diapers. After having put a new diaper on, I took a wet cloth for cleaning her face, as I always do, and moved with it towards her face. At that moment, even before the cloth even touched her face, Mylène closed her eyes, tried to turn her head away, and made a very disturbed face. I was excited: she KNEW what was going to happen, because she saw me with the wet cloth, moving towards her face.
From this moment on, I tried to look for other examples of associations, Mylène already makes. And there are several:
Time to catch up with some old new developments.
A few weeks ago, we noticed that Mylène started to make associations between events or occurrences. I noticed this for the first time, when I was changing her diapers. After having put a new diaper on, I took a wet cloth for cleaning her face, as I always do, and moved with it towards her face. At that moment, even before the cloth even touched her face, Mylène closed her eyes, tried to turn her head away, and made a very disturbed face. I was excited: she KNEW what was going to happen, because she saw me with the wet cloth, moving towards her face.
From this moment on, I tried to look for other examples of associations, Mylène already makes. And there are several:
- She opens her mouth when you move a spoon with food towards her mouth
- When she sees a bottle with milk, she reaches out for it, and if we move the bottle closer to her face, she opens her mouth
(the previous two examples only work when she is hungry) - When you take a t-shirt or a pull-over, roll it up a bit and moving it towards her, she starts to make disturbed noises or starts shouting, because she knows what's coming: that thing is going to go over her head ... and she hates that!!
- Mylène knows that when she is hitting a hard object on the floor, or on another hard object, it produces noise. She likes that and is hammering on the floor with many objects very enthousiastically.
The reason this development excited me so much, I think, was that making associations and using it as a trigger for particular behaviour, is, rather than reacting on intuition, the first step towards argumenting or logical reasoning ... a definite sign of intelligence. Perhaps trivial in the eyes of most people ... to me it was fascinating to notice!
