June 9, 2000 - Friday
I had a realization today about Harry environs: the papasan chair makes an excellent baby holder. It's actually in two parts with the big bowl part for sitting and the base. And, while it's usually positioned with the bowl heavily tilted to allow one's fanny convenient access, it can be positioned with the bowl straight up as well. Harry is sitting on his own now, but that also means that he is likely to fall eventually when left on his own. Yet, that's not a real concern in the papasan in bowl position. He can fall whichever way nature takes him and land on the cushion of the chair, not on the floor. He can even twist and turn, as he is doing frequently now and not make it over the lip for some time to come. What's more, he can have a pile of toys in there with him. It's a boon for baby watching.

Harry also played the child scientist again today, but this time at a second local college. It seems several colleges have infant study programs in their psychology departments and are in constant need of subjects. Harry and I are happy to help out. Today's experiment was for Harry to look at cards with either one or two dots in various sizes and configurations. By monitoring the amount of time he looked at each, the scientists could predict his understanding of the difference between one and two objects, regardless of their relative position. Other subject babies of a similar age in the study, I'm told, were shown different sets with different numbers of dots; for example, their cards might have had 4 and 8 dots instead of 1 and 2. The testers revealed that their preliminary results suggested that at Harry's age babies can distinguish the difference between 16 and 32 dots, independent of any pastern or position of the dots.


Comments, opinions?