Emily has been endowed with a nobel quest. There's no Lady of the Lake or sword Excalibur. There is a table, but it's not round. It's our rectangular coffee table, and Emily is on a quest to keep it clean.
Now that she can pull herself up on the coffee table, she has discovered a whole new world of opportunity before her eyes. This cluttered surface just begs to be organized. So, when she escapes our gaze, she grabs the closest thing and tosses it on the floor.
Fundamentally, she's driven by a need to empty things. She finds her toy basket and, one-by-one, emptys all the toys on the floor. In the bathroom, she'll crawl to her laundry basket and proceed to place all the clothes in two piles--one on each side of her. Of course, when the basket is empty, she entertains herself by relocating the pile on the right to the left and visa-versa. She does all this with the serious look of labor appropriate for one who has been commissioned.
With this innate talent for organization, I'm looking forward to training her to do the opposite--pick stuff up and put it where it goes. Hm...we could call it the "second quest."
See Emily at work
Posted by enigma at February 24, 2004 02:09 PM