Glimpses of child development.

This past month I caught up with my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) as well as her husband, and I got to hang out with them and their now over-a-year-old baby some.

The baby was super cute, and it's been a trip to see her going from being able to sit up if you position her to sitting up by herself to crawling, and now to dragging herself up at the edge of the couch and standing.

For a while recently, too, she was also doing this really cute thing where she'd distinctly say the word "hi," but only in a whisper.

So, when I was over there, she was standing up and holding onto a big cardboard box that they had in the living room, and occasionally bouncing up and down on her feet while holding on to it.

To keep her occupied some, I drummed the top of the box, and then I made a cool sound by scratching my fingernails of both hands over the surface.

She seemed entertained by that, and then like a second later she joined me and started scratching her fingernails of both hands over the surface of the box in pretty much the exact same way.

It was really interesting cognitively to realize how much was going on in there, for her to perceive this very precise motion, and then to go and start doing the exact same thing with her body.

I told her parents what I saw, and her dad was like, "Oh yeah, she's been a total mime lately," and he looked at her and did this popping thing with his mouth.

She just stared at him, but then like thirty to forty seconds later, she was looking in another direction and began doing that same random popping motion with her mouth, so you can tell that the memory of that same random popping motion thing was rattling around in her brain somewhere all that time.

All in all, it was just very fascinating.

A bit after that visit, I was at my doctor's for a physical, and they had a child development chart up, and around the baby's age they noted mimicking as something that babies tended to start doing at around that same exact age.