Messing with baby's mind

Well, back from San Francisco! Jonathan gave me a delighted grin when Chris brought him in to see me this morning. I took the day off work to spend some time with him. It's still kind of cold outside, so I thought we'd check out the Virginia Discovery Museum on the Downtown Mall.

The VDM is basically a big playspace for kids. They have a frontier cabin, and a pirate ship, and a rainforest and other exhibits. Most of it is geared to the five-and-under set. Jonathan and I plunked down our $8 and went inside. First, I had to convince him to leave the coatroom. I'm sure he thought that was the best room there - full of shoes and strollers. We finally managed to cross the threshold and he promptly proceeded to pick up a piece of train track and start chewing on it.

We wandered around for another twenty minutes. Jonathan chewed on a Lego, a shark, a pirate coin, and the Daddy from the doll house (who was fantastically dressed in a seventies vest and bell-bottoms ensemble, complete with medallion and man-fro, all in injection-molded plastic.) I was looking over the comments on the bulletin board when I spotted "The Kaleidoscope Room."

The Kaleidoscope is two boards that project outwards and make a triangle with the wall. They're mounted on four-foot tall legs, so you duck underneath and stand up to find yourself inside. All the inside surfaces are mirrored, and the images repeat endlessly. I thought Jonathan would LOVE the Kaleidoscope, since he loves to wave at and kiss himself in the mirrors at home.

I scooped him up, ducked into the Kaleidoscope, and gave him his first look. His head whipped around as he saw first one, then another, then another image looking right back at him. He reached out his arms to touch them, so I brought him in closer to the junction of two mirrors. At first he looked thrilled to greet six more of himself. But something about the whole set-up must have been very disorienting. He kept looking back and forth, back and forth. Then he looked up at me and started to cry with a terrified look on his face. I put him down and he didn't even bother to stand up - he just crawled out as fast as he could.

We spent another forty minutes at the museum. Jonathan found a fishing net on a stick and carried it around. Periodically another kid would tackle him, but he didn't seem to mind. Another mom asked if he had older siblings at home, since he seemed so indifferent to getting knocked over. I think he was just relieved that not everyone looked like him anymore.