Indirect Objects

I’ve got everything ready (including myself) to bring Molli over to mormor’s, but Molli’s still sleeping and I’m damned if I’m going to wake her. So you’re the beneficiaries of these bonus moments of leisure.

Not much in the way of new photos… A cute one of a butt-naked Molli doing her frog impression:

And a cute closeup in which you’ll notice the very first trace of her bangs:

She’s started whistling again, and we’re encouraging her like mad. I’ve tried to record it, but the minute she notices the camera it consumes all her attention and the whistling stops. And if I try to sneak up on her—well, woe unto him that tries to sneak up on Molli. Her infant radar is faultless.

The most interesting thing I’ve seen her do this week is use an indirect object. Until now, the world was more or less one big toy. Molli would pick things up, sometimes wave them around, then jam them in her mouth. Or, if their size was prohibitive (as in the case of coffee tables, adult limbs, radiators, and so on), she would simply apply her mouth as though trying to bite off a piece.

[Molli woke up and I got her off to Vibeke, but I have to finish this before I get into my work. It’s quick.]

Molli loves Clara, the uglier, stupider, and noisier of the cats. I suppose it’s just as well that someone finally gets delight out of the beast. Molli lights up whenever she sees Clara, and usually makes a beeline right for her. Clara is a little shy about all this attention, since Molli’s demonstrations of affection aren’t particularly affectionate from a feline point of view, and tends to scramble whenever Molli approaches.

The other day I set Molli down a few feet away from Clara, who was dozing peacefully beside the coffee table. They looked at one another happily. Molli cooed with excitement and looked at me incredulously. Her look said, “Can you believe it? This cat that I love is sitting right there, not running away!”

Then she began crawling not toward Clara, but toward a little foot-puppet thing that lay on the floor nearby. She picked it up, then corrected her course back toward Clara without paying it another bit of attention. That’s extremely unusual: normally the moment she takes something in her hand, it’s immediately transformed into the gravitational center of the universe and quickly expands to blot out the existence of everything else.

Anyway, she scrambled right over to Clara, stopped about six inches short of her, and began “petting” her with the toy. By “petting” I obviously mean “whacking over the head,” but it was a gentle sort of whacking and Clara didn’t run away. This went on for about thirty seconds, until at last Molli became so excited that she unloosed a shriek that sent Clara dashing away at full speed (and shattered half our windows and activated a dozen car alarms).

This morning something on one of our shelves caught her eye. She crawled toward the shelf, eyed the nearby pile of pillows and blankets, pushed them against the shelf, then climbed up on them to reach the thing she ought never to have reached (a little Brazilian drum with beads on strings that when you roll the handle between your palms will “beat” the drum) and began trying to consume it. I had to take it away from her immediately, which prompted about ten minutes of anguished crying, but I was impressed at her having figured out how to get up there.

These both could have been coincidences, I suppose. She may have grabbed the toy, then decided to grab Clara, then tried to grab her without remembering about the toy. She may have merely pushed the pillows and blankets because that’s what she often does to big, lightweight objects—either that or, less cleverly, pull them down on top of herself.

Anyway, intentional or not, these were her first uses of indirect objects I’ve ever seen—her first use of tools. Her behavioral intelligence has now finally surpassed “very bright dog,” and is inching toward “confused monkey.”

Then it’s just one more step to “dad…”