learning the basics

i remember back when i was gearing up to take the graduate record examination, or the gre, and ordered the "gre for dummies" book online. as i was going through it i realized that i have learned a lot of stuff in my life that i successfully managed to purge from all but the deepest crevasses of my mind. the pythagorean theorum sounded familiar but for all i knew it could have been a recipe for hummus. prefixes, suffixes and roots seemed like hazy word bubbles flitting here and here as if in a dream. and don't even try to remind me how to calculate the total volume of a heptahedron. my point is that i have learned many things in my life that haven't really stuck with me through thick and thin. compare this with my six-month-old who is learning lessons hand over foot (and sometimes foot in mouth) every waking moment. and almost every one of these concepts are permanently forming her into a real live person. sure, i know that annabel is a person. she has been since her mother and i split a bottle of wine and...nevermind. i know that she's a person. but there is a far cry from an infant with the mental capacity to choose between screaming or smiling and a rhodes scholar calculating how many organic compounds and cellular organelles are involved in protein synthesis. one of the key differences is that most rhode scholars don't need a boppy pillow to help them sit up. but as i watch our daughter learn and develop every day i am constantly amazed by a very simple concept, what she just learned she will never unlearn. think about it. currently she's working really hard to sit up by herself. once she masters that she will ALWAYS be able to sit up. she learned how to roll over a few months ago. she now rolls all the time. she finally figured out how to get the food from the spoon into her mouth (okay sure, she still manages to get half of it on her pants) and i am fairly confident that that's a lesson that will stick. now, i know that there are many things that she won't remember learning yet and quite frankly that's not always a bad thing. she still constantly reaches too far for a toy when she's sitting on the floor and inevitably face plants. and then she does it again. but its all part of the process. one day it will click in her head and years from now when she's reaching for the grape that rolled behind the couch, she will be fully aware that if she crosses a point in the lean-over she will instantly be reminded of what floor tastes like. i am amazed when i think about all of this. the amount of learning that she is experiencing every minute is so much more than her mother and i are undergoing, and it is very fun to watch.

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