Sugar and Spike: Safety-Pin Scientist!

When you sat on the couch to read this magazine, you jumped up again like a jack-in-the-box - right? You were stabbed by a tin fire truck that someone had left in the chair - right?Well,YOU BELONG TO THE CLUB!

Then you opened this magazine - you TRIED to, anyhow, but the pages were stuck together with peanut butter and jam! Well, now that you've pried your way through the book to this page, you've automatically become a member in good standing of the "Bothered and Bewildered Big Borthers and Sisters of America!"

And there's no way out of it, either! Complaining to your mother gets you nowhere! She'll tell you, you're grown up now and, after all, "HE'S ONLY A BABY!" And there's your problem!

If you multiply these two samples of mischief by the number of minutes your baby brother or sister is awake during the day, you have a good picture of a bad situation - and it's all yours!

Grim? Well, maybe - but how about trying this: put yourself in the baby's place for a minute, and see how things look to you then!

Right away, you're a stranger in a foreign country. You don't speak the language and you don't know the customs. You can't move around very well by yourself, so it's hard to find out about things. Probably the first thing that strikes you is being behind the bars of this thing called a "crib" is pretty much like being in prison! So you look for a way out...

You notice, first of all, that your equipment consists of two hands and two feet. By careful experimentation, you learn that those wiggling things on the ends of your hands belong to you, and you can grab things with them! You learn that by holding onto the bars of your crib, you can pull yourself to a standing position.

Ahah! So THAT's what feet are for! Nice to know! You'll be able to use them. But before you find out HOW, someone comes along.

You are lifted out of the crib. "This," you think to yourself, "is progress! Now you're getting somewhere!" But what happens? Kerplunk! You're behind bars again. This time, it's called a playpen and it's meant to keep you out of mischief. To you, it's only another caboose!

To keep you quiet, the grown-ups give you colorful toys to play with. What they don't understand is that YOU DON'T WANT TO PLAY -- YOU WANT TO EXPERIMENT! You hold a wooly lamb in the air. You let go of it. It falls down. No matter what you do, you can't get it to stay in the air. Well, look what you've done! you've discovered the law of gravity all by yourself! The big people had to wait thousands of years for a fellow named Issac Newton to point this out to them. But you've found it out before you're a year old --- and STILL they complan when they have to pick up your toys after you drop them!

Now, by standing up and falling down, and pulling yourself up and falling down, over and over again, you learn to stand without holding on. Then you put one foot in front of the other. Say -- that's something! You moved forward --- you can walk! Of course, the big people have been trying to teach you this for some time, but not knowing the language, you wondered what they were getting at.

Now that you think of it -- those noises that grown-ups make must mean something! New problem -- find out what they mean! And you have to learn it fast in order to find out why some of our experiments get you hugged and kissed, and others make people wave their arms in anger and holler loud noises at you. Unlike the high school student who had to learn a foreign language -- you have a REAL job to do: they already know one language, but you're starting from scratch!

While all this is going on, you're busy trying to make friends. You can't read, so no book of instructions will help you. You can't talk, so you can't ask for advice. Does this give you the blues? Not a bit! You cheerfully decide to find out the score for yourself. Half the time your experiments get you into the doghouse but you make mental notes of what happened so that you can stay out of trouble the next time. That's why your memory is so important -- because you certainly can't write anything down, as an ORDINARY scientist would!

It's just one thing after another! No college graduate ever put as much hard thinking in his sixteen years of formal education as baby puts in the first two years of his life.

So that's how the other side of the picture looks. The next time your baby brother or sister pours pabum all over your arithmetic homework, try not to complain. Just remember that the fault is probably yours -- you had no business getting in the way of an important scientific experiment! Just who do you think you ARE, anyway!