The thing about being a human is that you have your own will. That is fine and dandy if you are responsible for making those desires manifest on your own, but with a baby human their personal will is a real pain in the ass. When they are infants their needs are simple. “Feed me, get this shit out of my pants, burp me, I have to fart, and put me to sleep now.” But as they get older and begin to have a more complex understanding of the world, their needs mature and multiply respectively. “Give me your phone, I want what you are eating, I want to flush the toilette repeatedly, I don’t want to eat that, don’t look at Facebook.”

In learning how to understand this new toddler phase of The Munch’s development, I started to read “Happiest Toddler on the Block” because if my baby isn’t happier than everyone else’s I am going to punish her and she will be sorry.

In this book Dr. Karp talks about how toddlers are like cavemen and should be treated and talked to as such. Like our ancient brethren, they are mostly controlled by the right brain and are highly emotional as a consequence. He goes on to say that we cannot treat toddlers like mini adults, or even mini children, because they lack the brain capacity to process information in a way that is more “civilized” and “reasonable.”

This got me thinking about how the growth of a human from conception to adulthood mimics the evolution of all species on this planet.

Think about it. We begin as a single cell organism, then we become a tadpole like thing, then we turn into a fish-like early fetus, then we grow a tail and become sort of reptilian, then we are born and take our first breath of air and are mammals, then we start to crawl around like a chimpanzee monkey type, then we walk around grunting and pointing like an early human hybrid Australopithecus Africanus, then we become kids and are like a Neanderthal, then we are teenagers which is the missing link part of evolution, then finally we evolve into Homo Sapiens as adults.

Isn’t that so profound? I don’t know if it comes off as deep as it does in my own internal monologue but it made me feel like we really are children of the stars.