Good morning! I hope the world is being good to you and you’re being good to it.

Grab your coffee or beverage of choice and share a thought with me!

Have you ever seen a dog staring, growling, or barking at seemingly nothing? It’s unsettling when you think how they can see and sense what we cannot. What’s lurking in the shadowy corners and just beyond what the light touches? We’re probably better off not knowing; ignorance is bliss. But, what if your 1-year old does it?

When my daughter was only months old, and I paced around our bedroom with her in my arms at the wee hours in the morning, I often wondered what so held her attention that she turned her head to follow a singular spot in the room. The room was dark and I was beyond fatigued, so my imagination ran wild. Despite every rational thought telling me I knew every corner of the room and item in it, shivers still ran down my spine and the hair on the back of my neck stood at attention.

Over a year later, we’re not pacing in the earliest of AMs, but the stakes are almost higher. She’s far more aware of her surroundings and can talk, and if she’s paying attention to something, I’m paying attention too. There was a moment with just her and me in the house, at dusk, and we were playing on the living room floor. Suddenly, her focus shifted to the hallway leading off the living room back toward the master bedroom. She pointed, giggled, and said the word she uses when she’s trying to get our attention. I followed her look and, given the intensity of her focus, half expected someone to emerge from the hallway, but it remained empty, at least to my eyes. Despite the absence of activity, my daughter looked back at me, said her attention word again, and looked back to the hallway. We were back to spine shivers and standing hair.

Despite that moment and its predecessors, I don’t think my daughter has any sort of extra sensory perception. When she was an infant, her vision was blurs and some color. The glow of the nightlight or its reflection off the mirror could have mesmerized her. As she gets older, the world holds many mysteries to her, but that number will continue decreasing as she learns how things work and is able to pull back the curtain on many current fascinations. Her point down the hallway could have been telling me she wanted to look at the portraits on the wall or trying to convey she knew where mama and dada slept. Her attention “word” at the time was more an alerting sound than a word, but it conveyed enough when paired with her point to get my imagination cooking. Since we are unlikely to have memories from those early moments of our lives, I cannot truly relate to what she can see and how she understands that input. I have to arrive at a rational explanation because I’m an adult, and I can only relate to her communication based upon my own remembered experiences and understanding. So while I don’t fully know what my child sees, it’s unlikely she saw anything more than I saw myself. But what if…