This right here means so much to me. Look at that drawing: those are faces!

Some milestones just sort of take your breath away. And this one was especially important to me because of a fear I’ve kept tucked away in the corner of my mind…

I once saw a comparison between drawings made by a child who’s exposed to too much media vs one who gets less than an hour of screen time a day. The one looked like worthless scribbles, the other was a normal kid’s drawing. It’s a lot like that spiderweb comparison you’ve probably seen before:

Yikes, right?! My best intention was always to keep screen time to a minimum, but you know what they say about good intentions… an exhausting pregnancy, caring for a newborn… let’s just say my daughter has had a lot of iPad & TV time the past year.

I know that times change and people adapt, and she’s probably just fine. In fact, objectively I truly believe we as a society are probably being a wee bit over–dramatic about the whole thing.

And yet, I’ve been worried about rotting her brain. And every page full of senseless scribbles secretly scared me as I displayed it on our fridge.

I know, I know, it’s a fine motor skill that takes time to develop, but I couldn’t help but worry. Was she drawing scribbles all over the page because she just hasn’t developed this skill yet? Or was it because she was spending too much time consuming and not creating?

So these faces that I found her meticulously drawing last night are everything. I’ve never seen her do this before.

We were doing the bedtime routine and she wasn’t really paying attention, quietly scribbling on her doodle pad. I figured she was trying to stall bedtime (shocker!) and was about to give her a hard time about not looking at the picture book papa was reading to her when my husband looked over at what she was doing. “She’s drawing faces!” Sure enough, there they were, no doubt about it! I asked her what she was drawing and she pointed to the middle one, explaining that it was a baby with a binky.

It’s hard to put into words how I felt right then. The cognitive leap she had made seemed enormous. My heart just burst with pride at this girl of mine! This is one moment where I realized, in an instantaneous flood of relief, that we’re doing OK.