The Boy turned 4 weeks today and he started to smile. We’ve seen flickers of half smiles that seemed more like twitches or facial tics or gas spasms, but today was different, and I have to admit I got all fizzy in the brain, especially since he was with me at the time. I brought him upstairs to show Rachel as if I’d just taught him a new trick. I put him on the bed - “Look what he can do.” He gave less of a performance for her but she also seemed to think he’d taken a step toward ‘real smiling’ too. The whole experience got me thinking about why he was smiling. What’s so funny anyway? Maybe he was laughing at me or mocking me in some way. Conspiring even. As I thought about it, his smile did seem to have a wicked, omniscient quality to it. Like he knew something I didn’t. As usual, when I’m faced with anything mysterious or special - I Googled it: why do babies smile? I asked. And I learned that infants smile in their sleep from the day they are born (something I dismissed as impossible even as I watched him smile in his sleep from the day he was born), and infant smiles have nothing to do with gas (something I was convinced of as I watched his earlier half smiles). Clearly I know next to nothing. And now that I think of it - who smiles when they have gas? How many of these absurd truism do I carry around in my head? I do know some people who smile and even get a good laugh after they pass gas but that’s altogether different. And as for those sleeping smiles - they occur in REM sleep - which got me wondering what the heck is he dreaming about? I Googled that too: what is my baby dreaming about? And it turns out nobody knows. But researchers are fairly sure that they’re not having nightmares because they don’t grasp the meaning of fear yet. Imagine that. Not understanding fear. I don’t know if I believe that especially after falling for the whole ‘gassy smile’ cock-and-bull for so many years but it sure is worth holding onto. Either way I figure this is the next frontier to explore now that we’ve got the giant squid on camera. There should be a massive funding effort directed at infant’s dreams. This could unlock some of great mysteries of humanity – tapping into the human mind before it’s cluttered with fear and screaming advertisements and cornballs who try to hold you down because of their own hang ups. Man, if we could all eliminate those things we’d be taking some giant leaps forward. I’m gonna start following this baby’s lead.
More to come.
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