Milestones

With Bella on my stomach, we played the night away in the tub, adventures all around. For Isabelle, it was the excitement of splashes, and having each hand occupied simultaneously. For me, it was seeing the wheels in her brain crank away at this new experience. I never grow tired of watching her play with such genuine fascination, and I craved more after she decided she was done.

Bella has teething links that she very much enjoys picking up and throwing and putting in her forehead, nostril, eyeball, ear, mouth (success!). She's getting used to grabbing with one hand lately, but if both make it there at the same time, a hand tug-o-war ensues. The loser relinquishes its grip, while the winner goes on to do a victory dance. Tonight, she managed to pull the two links apart, and she had one toy in each hand. Despite that she has pretty much mastered the one handed reach, accomplishing this while the other was still occupied was a revelation.

It's fascinating for me to watch her drop one link, pick it back up (the other one still in the other hand, mind you!), explore it, compare the two. She'd drop one and you could just see the look on her face, Man down, Man down! She never missed a beat and would pick it back up immediately. (This two-hand thing is very efficient, no?) Floating links didn't phase her one bit, she just plunged her hand right through the water and confidently brought the toy to her mouth for inspection. She has become very dexterous and actually seems surprised these days if she reaches for an object and her hand swoops up towards her mouth without it.

Even more amazing to me is watching these interactions while I imagine what she is thinking, and then realize that she has no language, no words in her head to form thoughts as I know them. And yet I can see her thinking, plain as day. My studies in linguistics focused on how a language can alter or restrict a person's thought process. The minds of babies, who have no set language and only instinctual understanding and communication, fascinate me beyond measure.

I assign words to Bella to put her experiences in a frame of mind that I can understand, but I would love to simply empty my brain and experience things as she does, without the judgmental filter of language. She is born with an innate understanding that lets her compare new with old, strange with familiar, different with similar, and beyond. But imagine exploring those concepts without even those few words as reference. Just being, no thinking.

In googling this recently, I found a little reading on the concept of babies' thoughts.
Here's one study on thought process without language.
I'm interested to find more, and hear more view on this. What do you think? (words allowed!)