Miru

Fragments written for my daughter Miru, born January 2013. Observations about her life, her learning, her loveliness. I share stories about how she grows up as a bilingual child dividing her time between different continents. There are also reflections about parenthood, as well as letters that I write to her.

Miru also has her own website at miru.creativechoice.org

Kiekeboe
[series-miru] The last episode of this series that I'm writing for my daughter appeared many months ago. This is not because there was nothing interesting in between, but because I couldn't find the time and motivation to write. We have been traveling, and had some bureaucratic issues to take care of regarding our simultaneous "legal" ...
Missing Miru
[series-miru] For a variety of reasons that I had instantly forgotten when looking at a smiling Miru, I had decided to travel. Looking for new clients, exploring new countries, visiting friends, making use of stopovers on a journey to Europe - all are equally valid and ridiculous reasons to miss the baby for a few ...
A little experiment
[series-miru]Miru is about 125 days old, and still the gorgeously cute and quiet baby she has always been. Yesterday, I used her in a little scientific experiment, the ethical justification of which derives from the fact that there was no need for an artificial reward, nor was there the need of inflicting anything remotely uncomfortable ...
Mirror
[series-miru] Still short of the 100-days milestone, a big event here in Korea, we've seen Miru developing some skills well before their due date. She can lift up her head entirely, she can put her hands together, she grasps things, she smiles spontaneously - and is fascinated by her own image in the mirror. She ...
What if our child becomes…?
[series-miru] Our daughter is 66 days old now and most of her actions are reflexes of the hunger she feels, the discomfort her skin communicates to her, the sounds she hears and the blotches of color we assume she sees. She smiles a lot, and we've been tempted to attribute that to her character, but ...
Beguiling Ambiguity
I wrote a theoretical reflection about binary communication with babies a few weeks ago, and I'm going to add something to that. Don't worry: I won't advocate ternary or n-ary communication here. Rather, I want to say something about ambiguity and undecidedness. About half an hour ago, Miru was hungry (she eats a lot) and ...
Cries and Music
This is part of a series of blog posts that is inspired by our baby daughter, Miru. It is well known that babies have a sonic prehistory that starts in the womb, and advice to comfort a baby often includes exposing her to white noise similar to the audible sensations she had while in utero. There ...
Awaiting Binary Communication
This is part of a series of blog posts that is inspired by our baby daughter, Miru. Every infant starts out in this world with a one-word vocabulary, the content of which we (from the perspective of our infinitely nuanced expressive apparatus) then interpret as crying. I don't know how the baby herself experiences the crying, ...
Burping the baby
This is part of a series of blog posts that is inspired by our baby daughter, Miru. Imitation, it seems, begins as soon as our children open their eyes, just in ways we are unable to recognize due to our preoccupation with highbrow communication techniques like smiling and cooing. What if the baby develops its ...