It starts: Babies went from a warm, soft, quiet nurturing place complete with food service and regular cleaning. Next stop: A noisy place that is hot, cold, and smelly. It’s constant, unpredictable sensory overload after living in a vanilla cocoon. It seems a lot like puberty in a country where you cannot communicate, no one understands you and emotions overwhelm you. You are tired and hungry all the time. Things like hands can intrigue you for hours and you are not sure what they are. Feet are a yet unfound mystery. Coordinated fine-motor skills that might lead to motion is as foreign as space travel to apes. Right now, you are pretty much stuck in the position the giant left you. In the last month, you grew 10% taller and added almost 20% to weight. No wonder you are so hungry, tired and have literal growing pains. Every few hours, something happens and you are moved, become cold, feel awkward movement and then put back into clothing and moved again. Except when it happens three times inside of five minutes. Not that time has any concept to you. In some distant future, you may recall the Giants grumbling about “It’s time again?!?” or “I need time to sleep!” but that implies you could actually clearly hear the sounds around you. Or see for that matter. When things are not too bright or dim, they are usually blurry. Then, they go from black and white blurry to color blurry. And it seems room service no longer provides on demand at all hours. You struggle with how to deal with this new uncomfortable feeling of hunger that usually results in repeated emphatic calls to management in the only language they seem to understand.

While we may not remember the first few months of our lives, we can certainly empathize with the first few of our newborn.  Children are innocent in that they do not have unpure or manipulative motives. The language they have to communicate is just rapidly evolving.