Spaceship Oscar

Oscar's got a brand new toy, yeah. We call it the flying saucer. It comes to us courtesy of Karl, Bouchra, and Marvin, who have to move back to France for a year on June 1.

It seems like it would be terrifyingly overstimulating, but Oscar seems to enjoy it OK. He can jump up and down and cover it with drool, his two main criteria. It can also make horrible musical sounds, but most fortunately, we can turn those off, so all we hear is Oscar saying Mmmmaaa.

In the car today he actually said Mama, very loud and distinct, and immediately went back to moaning. It was both exciting and anticlimactic, since he clearly had no concept of what he was doing. As Piaget says, "for him the world is essentially a thing to be sucked." The world as a thing to be talked to, and to listen to him, won't come until much later.