First map!

The other day, Tina and I are sitting in the office together, talking about Lena (seriously, when you become a parent, it's like the only thing you talk about!). Tina says to me: “she’s really starting to imagine herself in the world.” At three (shit, almost four!) years old, it seems like her cortex is just exploding, making so many connections, recalling, projecting. She’s grasping abstract concepts, spatial and temporal scales. It’s like she is constructing an inner world for herself to compliment the outer realm of sense perception that was her sole reality until now. The outer perceptory world of sensations and emotions is now being put into the context of an imagined geography of memories, stories, and knowledge, of past and present, of here and there. I know one day she will look back on her childhood and resent me for treating her like a research subject in a spatial cognition experiment, but I can't help myself. 

She gave me a drawing the other day, crayons, with big green circles, and in the swirls were scribbled and spatially segregated swatches of brown, beige, red, green and pink. I asked her what it was: “a map.” Pointing to the green circles – this is the United States. And the green swatch “this is where we go hiking in the forest” and the pink swatch “Kansas”. It was her first map…predictably, I nearly broke out in tears. But this map was just such a beautiful visual expression of the complex inner world that is growing inside of her mind, memories and emotions and experiences spatialized in an interactive map being written with every thought.