baby personalities and i love my parents

Today in my Psych senior seminar, we watched a movie clip where some psychologists presented 4-month-old babies with a "stimulus"- a colored mobile moving close to their faces. Apparently, their later personalities could be predicted from the way they reacted. Babies which tended to tense up or cry at the mobile, would become quiet and introverted as older children, teenagers, and adults; babies which were interested, smiled, or tried to play with it became extroverts. They followed the children in the study for years and it virtually always followed this exact pattern.

I emailed the parentals,
"Parents! ...When I was a baby, if I was exposed to stimulus aka mobiles, lots of people, movement and noise/color, etc... how did I generally react?" ...just to see if the theory worked.

Without knowing why I was asking, they sent me these replies:
"You were able to focus your attention, look delighted and generally did not seem to get overstimulated. You also babbled non stop." (yikes...), from Mom, and
"You reacted positively, reaching out (literally, with the mobile, to swat it), wishing to engage, smiling, curious", from my dad.

So apparently I fit the pre-extrovert baby type... huuuge shocker!

On another note, it makes me feel a surprising amount of warmth-and-fuzziness to think that my parents know exactly how I was as a baby. Is that weird? Maybe that should be obvious. But I mean. It was 21 years ago, and they both sent these detailed responses (those were just excerpts... my mom's email back was like a full paragraph detailing my napping style as compared to my sister's), within ten minutes of getting mine.

I was on the phone with my dad shortly after and pointed this out to him.
"Aw... that's cute that you remember how I was as a baby."

And he (after being like, um, duh), went all waxing poetic about how I was just like how I am now and Allie was making everybody laugh from the time she was 1 month old ("Really! You know that face she makes? I swear, she made it then too!") and when he thinks of us as infants it's like we're totally the same people we are now, "We already knew who you were so well! We could tell! You were so YOU!".

I like my parents.
I mean: when I was a 4-month-old babbling, mobile-reaching baby... I hadn't gotten into Wheaton, or George Fox. I hadn't gone to Bolivia. I had never loved anyone, or said anything important, or made a friend, or journaled in a coffee shop, or straightened my hair in a particularly attractive way, or organized a dorm room, or given a presentation on gender and sexuality (I mean I hadn't even BLOGGED!). And, they still thought this little baby was beautiful and exciting and worth remembering the details of two decades later. And they thought I was ME, even before I had done anything me-like. And maybe that's obvious, and maybe that's cheesy, but as an about-to-graduate-oh-crap-what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life-21-year-old, I find that lovely and wonderful and meaningful. (And oh, the spiritual analogies!) :-)

Okay, this is a really random post. In conclusion: I have always been fated to be an extrovert;
having cute parents is a highly recommendable state of existence;
and I really like my parents a lot in particular.