Your first real time at Camp. We’re here for the week and you seem to have settled in – listening to the birds, marching into the lake, playing with your cousins. The walking is an wonder. You hold on to my or Daddy’s fingers, bolt upright between our legs, then toes pointed out, knees bent, you sweep your feet, one at a time, in an outward semi-circle to a point a long stride ahead of you. For all the support it requires and all it’s inefficiency (not not lack of grace, it’s quite pretty to watch), it is decidedly purposeful. We go – to someone or somewhere – and then, it it’s not something behind a solid object (like . person) you want in which case you move on (though you’re stationary) and then you stop, let your legs go loose and we sit and play with the object of your mission. On Saturday you marched up to your chest into the lake. It’s cold, which you registered, but not so cold as to deter your explorations.

Your emotional/[indecipherable, sorry] range keeps expanding. Often by the time your Dad and I have figured something out, you’ve moved past it. A big task now seems how to make sense of a world that contains the known, the familiar, and the unknown. Until recently, I think, you didn’t discriminate much about the unknown, except live vs. inanimate, with the live eliciting active excitement and outreach and the inanimate, interest or not depending. It struck me that your biggest smiles and most explicit interest (leaning forward, bouncing, grinning) were for those you didn’t know, a kind of irresistible diplomatic overture from a small island to the world beyond. Now, though you still do this, you’ve developed delight for the known – people, passages of books, toys, as though, having situated yourself safely in the world you can now take pleasure in your local surroundings.