Fun Facts About Five-Month-Old Babies

The rains continue. And, fate being as fickle as she is, I'm now able to post photos again. Yes. The control freak in me is sated. Sweet control... It's not that I want tons of it. I just want it when I want it. Does that make sense? No, it doesn't. Maybe what I want, then, is the right to define everything and anything in my own terms. That sounds okay. It even sounds rugged and individualistic. It's still not realistic at all, though. The best I can do is play my part well and know that, in the end, whatever Order or Chaos there is to be found will be far, far outside of my control.

And so the rains pound the earth outside and the viaducts run with water and the lakes swell and the trees and animals sigh. Eleanor, Miss Stella & I would normally be hiking in the woods right about now. But what with the deluge and all, we're watching a little edutainment instead, which is to say that we're watching The Simpsons.

I should probably say that, no, I'm not trying to raise up another t.v. baby, like Papa like daughter. But a five month old has mega-huge fireworks continually going off in her brain. It's a time of intense cerebral development and captivation with what psychiatrists call sensorium, i.e. the input of the five senses. It's quite a thrill, the phenomenological world. Babies dig that.

A few months ago, Ella didn't really give a rat's ass about The World. She just wanted her Mama, her safety, and her milk. But now she loves to look at things, for example, and will stare for eons at, say, a bottle cap or the clouds in the sky. She loves faces, especially - as do all babies, as part of an evolutionary compulsion to spot order in the world's disorder. Facial features are fascinating to kids, because every human has them. And while exact facial characteristics vary from person to person, the general pattern is always there. Babies seem enamored by that fact.

Anyway, these facts make television watching pretty sweet for a baby, because there's all these faces and sounds and flickering colors. Ella totally digs it...for about ten minutes. Then she gets thoroughly bored by it (which is another sign of a baby's inherent intelligence), because she's not content to just observe things. She also wants to interact with them physically as much as possible. T.V. doesn't offer much in that sphere, except for the remote control, which all God's children seem to love to gnaw on like wolverines.