Baby J. Plays Piano!

Baby J. Screaming During an Early Session of Tummy Time

Sort of...actually, she mostly hammers the keys with her fingers. I usually sit with her, while I play a song, and she fools around. Lately though, she's become convinced that it's my hands that make the music happen. She can tell there's a big difference between when I'm playing, and when she's playing. She likes to grab my fingers really tightly, and then she'll strike the keys with my hands expecting the same results as when I play. When that doesn't work, she takes my hand and puts it to her mouth; I'm not sure what she's trying to accomplish when she does that. After neither of these works, she becomes really frustrated and wants to leave the piano.

Baby J. has always been that kind of baby, one that becomes extremely frustrated when she can't do something. We started giving her tummy time at a very young age, and when we did, she hated it. We couldn't understand why she hated it so much. We'd put her down on her tummy, and she would just scream and scream. It didn't dawn on us until much later that the reason she was screaming at first was because she couldn't do anything yet; she hated being down on her tummy and unable to crawl, unable to sit up, unable to see what was going on. We realized it because she's always been trying to do everything early; she was trying to stand up before she could even hold her head up; she was crawling at an extremely early age; she was cruising along furniture way before most babies; and it never mattered how difficult these things were for her at the time. She was going to do them.

I know some babies are content with their lot in life, content to go at their own pace. Baby J. isn't one of those babies. It's something I wonder about. Will that continue to be part of her personality as she gets older? Will she always push herself harder to get what she wants sooner rather than later? I hope so, because it's one of the things that's certainly lacking in me.

D.