First steps

today I was rewatching episode four of season III of House, the one where the bad doctor treats an autistic patient named Adam for worms. Throughout the episode House manages to connect with the young boy in ways that only House can, managing to use primitive means of psychological reasoning to coax the small thing into breathing in the knockout agent (he applied the mask to himself first and breathed in quite a few gulps of air, though he might have been trying to get high). At the end of the show, in a display of gratitude unprecedent to the boy, Adam presents house with his beloved PSP. On both occasions his parents nearly wet themselve with joy on what they called were Adam 'breakthroughs' This got me thinking, why do we celebrate and embellish something that is so simple to development and growth of our young?

Of course clearly, Adam's parents have reason to be opening the good champaign, but for the rest of us? We're expected to walk by the age of one, mumble a few mispronounced words by two and link more of those together in incoherent sentences by three. But if everyone's doing it, what makes it so celebratory? Baby's first steps, whip out the home video. Baby's first words, jump to the phone to call everyone from your mother to that uncle's second cousin's hairdresser's wife whom you've probably haven't called in about a month, and I was refering to the former.

Could it not a celebration of trimuph, but rather a celebration of relieve that causes the otherwise illogical jump to the phone? The simple notion that their child is normal and thriving as it is supposed to elicits such reactions. Why? Could it mean that the parents are relieved that they can go about their lives as close to normalcy as possible, not requiring to spend extra energy, money or stress to deal with a 'special' child. It's not easy to bear one, since not only will trips to see doctors suck finances, then parents will have to deal with the misunderstood social life and sociological problems that the child will surely encounter.

Maybe I'm just in a cynical mood, after all, terrible twos are supposed to be able to mutter such disyllabic words as mama, no no, want food and what not. I think I'd be more surprised if they suddenly sprung Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Regulator upon me than if they merely suddenly decided to use their over worked vocal chords for something more useful than the unicomprehensible crying.

Apart from this post actually having this disclaimer that this is merely a random rant, I need to nevertheless state that I really do like kids. Don't mind me seriously, I'm in one of my moods.

Off to run now kids! Bye.