(no subject)

Every skill can be broken down into two parts. There are the things you need to do, and the things you need to not do. The ability to not do the things you're not supposed to do is called behavioral inhibition, and in many contexts it's an invisible, hard-to-identify component of learning.

Not so when you're four or five months old. When Colin first started to be interested in reaching and grabbing, he spent a lot of time with his hands clasped in front of him. Why? Because when he reached out, pretty often the first thing his hand would encounter would be the other hand. He didn't know how not to grab it, even if he'd initially been reaching for something else.

He's since mastered the ability to inhibit himself from grabbing that other hand, but he's still working on a couple of other inhibition issues. When he tries to put a toy into his mouth, sometimes he'll aim it wrong and get the hand holding the toy into his mouth instead. Someday soon he'll be able to take that as a sign that he should turn the toy so he can chew on his real target. Right now he just gnaws on his hand, the toy hanging in front of his mouth out of reach. If he gets the toy angled right, great! If not, he can't inhibit the chewing response and redirect himself.

Also, he really wants to spend a lot of time these days holding his feet. But his thighs are in the way. He winds up holding his thighs or gripping behind his knees, even when he was clearly aiming for the feet. He just can't stop himself from grabbing on, even if holding his thighs prevents him from what he really wants to do.

I learned about behavioral inhibition in developmental psychology classes, but it has become so much more real through observation.

Nanny search.

We're talking to a few different nanny candidates. I helped Alex make her own checklist of qualities she is hoping for. This time I'm getting most of my questions out of the way over the phone, so that the interview can focus more on actual interaction between the prospective nanny and each of the kids.

In the meantime, Michael is running down the possibility of hiring a temporary sitter to look after Colin until we hire someone permanent, which should take some of the pressure of the search. We'd keep Alex at school full-time in the interim, because she's a lot more likely to be bothered by changes in caregivers than Colin is.

Colin is at work with me today. Right now he is taking a nap on my desk. I've got his changing pad underneath him, and he's tightly swaddled, and between those two things he is perfectly happy napping surrounded by binders and folders and my tape dispenser. I wish I had a camera.