Outwitting Us Already
Two stories from recent days:
1) On Saturday we had to take Fiona in for some tests that get run on babies her age (allergies, blood count, stuff like that). In order to take the blood, the nurse had to tie a tourniquet on to Fiona's arm. Fiona was, understandably, distressed by the sensation, but without missing a beat she started to pull at the tourniquet in an effort to remove it. The nurse told us it was the first time she'd ever seen a baby that young figure out what she was supposed to do to stop the pain.
2) As Fiona gets better and better at scooting around the apartment she wants more and more space to explore, while we want to limit her wanderings so we don't have to chase her all over the apartment. We hit on a temporary solution by putting gates on the doors to and from our living room, figuring that the room is large enough to entertain Fiona for quite a while. Because we also have a cat who is both social enough to want to be around people and skittish enough to want to get away from Fiona, we have one gate pushing up against a piece of furniture that he can crawl under to get out of the room.
The other door is fenced off by a gate similar to the ones people usually use to keep their pets out. Figuring that a cat can scoot lower to the ground than a baby, we wedged the gate into the door frame a few inches off the ground--basically the height of Fiona's head. We assumed this would work because Fiona has to lift her head off the ground when she scoots, meaning that the lower edge of the gate would keep her from getting out of the living room.
This morning (Wednesday), I put the gate in place and let Fiona play. Everyting went fine until Fiona spotted her mother in the hallway. She moved up to the gate and pressed her head against it, unable to move any further. So far so good; she'd done this before.
And then Fiona lowered her head to the ground and slid it under the gate. She pushed forward on her toes, sliding her shoulders across the ground. And then she emerged into the hallway, having conquered our sterling defenses a mere two days after implementation.
And our first thought was: she couldn't even give us a week?
1) On Saturday we had to take Fiona in for some tests that get run on babies her age (allergies, blood count, stuff like that). In order to take the blood, the nurse had to tie a tourniquet on to Fiona's arm. Fiona was, understandably, distressed by the sensation, but without missing a beat she started to pull at the tourniquet in an effort to remove it. The nurse told us it was the first time she'd ever seen a baby that young figure out what she was supposed to do to stop the pain.
2) As Fiona gets better and better at scooting around the apartment she wants more and more space to explore, while we want to limit her wanderings so we don't have to chase her all over the apartment. We hit on a temporary solution by putting gates on the doors to and from our living room, figuring that the room is large enough to entertain Fiona for quite a while. Because we also have a cat who is both social enough to want to be around people and skittish enough to want to get away from Fiona, we have one gate pushing up against a piece of furniture that he can crawl under to get out of the room.
The other door is fenced off by a gate similar to the ones people usually use to keep their pets out. Figuring that a cat can scoot lower to the ground than a baby, we wedged the gate into the door frame a few inches off the ground--basically the height of Fiona's head. We assumed this would work because Fiona has to lift her head off the ground when she scoots, meaning that the lower edge of the gate would keep her from getting out of the living room.
This morning (Wednesday), I put the gate in place and let Fiona play. Everyting went fine until Fiona spotted her mother in the hallway. She moved up to the gate and pressed her head against it, unable to move any further. So far so good; she'd done this before.
And then Fiona lowered her head to the ground and slid it under the gate. She pushed forward on her toes, sliding her shoulders across the ground. And then she emerged into the hallway, having conquered our sterling defenses a mere two days after implementation.
And our first thought was: she couldn't even give us a week?
posted by BWC at
11:54 AM
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