Douglas, writing for the blog A Mindful Monkey, shares some observations on the task of raising a newborn:
She is very curious
I already pretty much know how the world works. I don’t need to create mental models of what happens when a rubber duck gets put in a cup and taken out x 100 times like she does. I don’t have a desire to poke my finger into the ethernet port. I can’t imagine having to start from ground zero and develop an understanding of everything, but I guess I did it once and so does she.
[…]
Within the last month, she seems to have created the concept of ‘handle’ in her mind.
Instead of grabbing objects wherever her hand lands, she reaches for parts that are best fit to grab; even if the object is new to her. The concept of a handle seems pretty innate to me and I didn’t notice it until watching my daughter. It’s just instinctual that things have handles (or at least the best ways to grab them). It’s like she has developed a sense of physics (gravity, torque, etc) without actually knowing what those this are at all.
One more, from a follow up post:
One time I laid down to see what her mobile looked like from her perspective when she was an infant. It looked drastically less cool from her vantage point. She has since grown and is now at knee height. I wonder about how different every room feels from that height. The kitchen is towering over you, with no idea of what is going on up there. A refrigerator so tall you can only see the bottom row of food. You can never open a door.