Month: February 2005

The complexity of nature is amazing. But every time I see defense mechanism implanted in beings by nature I am really stunned. What is even more interesting is that humans have so many defense mechanism that they don’t even know many of them exist until it is time to use one.

A couple of examples from the recent parenting theme.

Firstly, when a woman gets pregnant and baby starts growing inside of her, the amount of blood in her body increases dramatically. Note, that the I am talking about the blood in woman’s body, not baby’s body. All this blood is used to grow a healthy life. But it is all lost during the delivery of the baby. Nice, eh? Balance strikes.

Secondly, during the last few months of the pregnancy, women don’t sleep very well. There are many factors here. Breathing is difficult. Getting into comfortable position varies from very difficult to impossible. Often need for urinating. Baby kicking. Etc. But such periodic sleep of few minutes to few hours at a time has also a positive sideeffect. It prepares the woman for being a mother. Infants wake up very often and expect to be feeded. Rapid change from good long comfortable sleep to the life style of a young mother is very stressful. Such changes can lead to all sorts of problems from presense and quality of milk to serious nervous breakdowns. Instead, nature takes care of this problem. It pushes the pregnant woman more and more with every day of the pregnancy. It helps the woman to change the values of sleep, food, and rest.

I find it amazing!

Drawing parallels between the skills and development models of a human baby suggests that humans are more similar to predatory animals rather than herbivorous.

Many herbivorous animals can use their legs few minutes or hours after the birth. They can stand on their feet, see, hear, and walk by their mothers. Predatory animals on the other hand, need a lot of time to get to that stage. They are born blind and deaf, can barely crawl and totally depend on their parents to feed and take care of them.

Taking time to get to adulthood is apparently worth a while. Predatory animals seem to possess more skills. Strategic and tactical skills accompany hunting. Food stocking is vital for many. Using herbs and other natural resources for self-medication is common.

Disclaimer: Looking at Maxim all day long, feeding him, watching him being changed and bathed all makes me think a lot. I also talk to Olga a lot. Sometimes we are getting interesting thoughts, which I value enough to blog. So if you will read here something extremely wise, don’t immediatly assume that it’s from my head – it might have been Olga. :) (both past and future posts included).

It is interesting how similar infant is to a computer system booted in safe mode (or rescue mode if you will). Theoretically, human is capable of a whole bunch of actions – talking, walking, running, etc. But you don’t get all of these in with the infant. Instead, you get a system which has extremely limited capabilities – just a few reflexes and virtually no communication. You than, as a parent, must build upon these capabilities to develop new ones, which in turn will help you to develop new ones, and than slowly slowly you will reach that day when you will realize that your small infant is not so small and infant anymore, but instead a full-blown human being with much more functionality than you can find use for.

Another similarity between the two is absolute lack of manuals…