Through the Eyes of a Child

At some point in the past few weeks, Billy noticed that Nora really likes looking outside.  He opens the front door so she can watch the flag wave from her jumper and holds her in front of the back screen door so she can watch his anemometer spinning in the wind.  In a continued attempt to increase her level of comfort on her belly, I've been putting her next to Oscar on the couch to look out the front window.  At first glance, it's hard to understand why she would find this scene even more mesmerizing than the TV.  Nothing's happening, in my opinion.  But as I've been sitting there watching her, I notice that she sees the wind blowing the branches of the trees, she watches the robin jump from its nest down to the ground and back, she watches people and cars pass by, and she watches Oscar's reaction to all of these same stimuli.

One of the best things motherhood has done for me is force me to slow down.  I'm still not very comfortable living at this different pace because I sometimes start to feel like I'm not "accomplishing" anything from one day to the next.  As Nora approaches her half birthday, however, realizing how much she has learned and developed by watching the world around her and feeling it out-- simply by being, really-- has helped me to see that oftentimes the things we "accomplish" somehow manage to build up invisibly until moments of significant, remarkable breakthrough.  Tracking movements with her eyes, reaching for a toy, and rolling over have all seemed like things she just woke up one day with the ability to do, but clearly she has been spending all the "unremarkable" days between slowly accumulating the necessary information.