This is new! Let's do it again!

Never Done: Take a cute baby video. When you're a baby, you do things you've never done every day, and then you want to do them again and again and again. I went to the playground today with T and her mom M. T, 13 months, played on the slide, in the rubber tire, on the swings, and for the first time in her life, in a veritable Never Done, in the sandbox. She adored the slide, and would have played on the it the entire time, but after a while, M and I would take her somewhere else to try something new. For the most part, she'd try the other things and be OK with them (with the exception of the sandbox, which she really didn't dig (so to speak) but after a while, these other things were, ultimately, not the slide. And so we would bring her back to the slide, and she would beam with delight as she went down it again, and again, and again. (And I took a video of that beaming delight with my iPhone, which was both the first time I'd taken a video with my iPhone, and the first time I ever took a cute baby video.)

Her mom says she is the same with books and watching videos. When she and her husband read T a new book or show her a little video of herself, T wants to hear it/see it again, right away, and again, and again, and again. M thinks it has something to do with making sure it's still the same -- that it hasn't changed. I imagine it also has to do with learning English, hand-eye coordination, and three act story structure.

So for T, the experiences of Never Done and Tshuve are closely intertwined. "This is new! Let's do it again!" If I'm honest with myself, I notice that I have the same impulses much of the time -- I just don't have the time to follow them the way I did when I was a kid. Maybe I'll put this one my Tshuve list -- spend a day shooting hoops, for as long as I want, the way I did when I was 15, or maybe watch the entire season of Battlestar Galactica in a single marathon, assuming I like it as much as everyone says I will.