My son is driving me crazy, in a relatively cute sort of way.
He's very recently discovered that through a combination of reaching and worming his way in various directions, he can access things that were previously unavailable to him. Right now, this newfound knowledge is overcoming a desperate need to sleep as he rolls and commandoes his way around the crib, grabbing onto various parts. And that's only after I took his pacifier away from him when I found him using it as some sort of rudimentary object of desire in a game of self-fetch.
And so, it's 7pm and he's beyond tired, screaming in his crib, stopping only to roll to the other side and reach for the bumper.
He's very recently discovered that through a combination of reaching and worming his way in various directions, he can access things that were previously unavailable to him. Right now, this newfound knowledge is overcoming a desperate need to sleep as he rolls and commandoes his way around the crib, grabbing onto various parts. And that's only after I took his pacifier away from him when I found him using it as some sort of rudimentary object of desire in a game of self-fetch.
And so, it's 7pm and he's beyond tired, screaming in his crib, stopping only to roll to the other side and reach for the bumper.
posted by isaacjosephson at 7:04 PM
2 Comments:
Sounds like torture. Unfortunately the only path to tranquility sometimes is through the chaos. Leaving 'em to go spastic in their crib is sometimes the only answer!
That "game of self-fetch"? Reminds me of one of my favorites:
From Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter 2
“This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner. . . . As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o-o’, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. . . . [T]his was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act.
The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting.”
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