Pushing the blue button
Last Tuesday I heard a sound coming from Madeline's room early in the morning that surprised me. It sounded not like the standard crying or squealing that normally marks the time to carry the baby for a pit stop on the changing table and then onwards to her mommy for a morning snack. This sound was the synthesized music of a Fisher Price Aquarium. Now the Fisher Price Aquarium is not the kind of product that you can easily leave on accidentally all night long and it would be the rough equivalent of a Psy-ops torture routine to leave it playing all night for a baby. The intelligent baby toy engineers at Fisher Price have the toy on a timer for about two minutes when the lights blink, the fish move, and the synthesized musac hums along. The routine is activated by a fat blue button on the front of the aquarium device. Madeline, either by accident or potentially intentially had manuevered herself to a point under the aquarium such that she could flail her arms in the air and would randomly push the blue button every few minutes to activate the music. She is my daughter after all - she loves to randomly push buttons on electronic devices. Never has a father been so proud. I wanted to present her with more giant electronic buttons immediately but this big blue button is the only one available thus far to test her genius with electronics. The next day I found her kicking a red wheel that spins on the same aquarium and spinning it with glee. The good news is that she has found objects to be entertaining. It doesn't last very long as I learned today while watching her and needed to resort to a long but rather entertaining set of Rolling Stones Karaoke (Ruby Tuesday, Let's Spend the Night Together, and Last time) in order to quiet a shrieking session that was coming on after I failed to move an Infantino pig with sufficient entertainment value or sound effects.