No, this isn’t a joke, though it made me laugh. To date, Lennie has had very little awareness of anything outside a radius of maybe three feet of where she happens to be sitting. That appears to be changing. She’s gotten to where she’ll take off crawling in some direction, then suddenly stop, turn around, and look back at where she came from with a big grin. She’s clearly developing a sense of “I was there where you are, and now I’m over here,” but until just recently, it’s still been her-centric; it’s been her going away and thinking “I was there.”

So this afternoon, I was locked up in my office working, music blaring and oblivious to the rest of the household. All of a sudden, I hear a knocking at my door. It’s pretty low down on the door, as if the cat is batting at the door, which he dometimes does. But it’s a more firm knocking than the pawing the cat usually manages. And it keeps going. So I get up to see what’s going on (suspicious that it might be Lennie and curious as to why she’s roaming around unsupervised knocking on doors), and sure enough, when I open the door, there’s Lennie beaming up at me proudly.

And there’s M, who had the impulse to pick Lennie up but just couldn’t resist witnessing the cuteness. Which I appreciated.

So now there’s an “otherness” sort of component to Lennie’s awareness. It was “I hear something in there, and think I’ll go investigate.” I like to think there was also something of “Hey, my daddy’s in there playing without me, and I think I’ll go join in the fun because he’s pretty much my favorite person ever” going on in her head but I’m not equipped to prove it, so I’ll withold the hypothesis for now.