Baby and Jupiter

My daughter has recently started calling the planet Jupiter “baby”:

You see, my daughter, whose now 20 months old, is starting to expand her vocabulary, but in pretty interesting ways. For example, she calls shoes, socks and feet “shoo-shoo”. She knows the word “feet” as “fee” or “ashi” (the Japanese word), but still prefers shoo-shoo. When she sees something small, she calls it “baby” because in her mind anything small is “baby”. By contrast, anything large is “daddy”.*

So, recently, we were looking out at the night sky from our window, when the planet Jupiter shone brightly in the sky.** To Baby, the star is bright and easy to notice, and she’s learning to notice the sky lately so she was deeply fascinated. She started calling it “baby” since to her it’s very small.

The following morning she pointed out the window where Jupiter had shone, saying “baby, baby” over and over, hoping to see it. Sadly tonight was cloudy so she couldn’t see it.

Still, I love the idea of having a junior astronomer in the family, to carry on my hobby with.

I’ve been an avid astronomer since I was eight years old, sitting out in my dad’s backyard with a star-chart and flashlight. I even majored in astronomy for a time in college until I flunked out of physics and didn’t do so well in Math. Needless to say though, I love this kind of thing, but I also make plenty of mistakes, and since I am not in the field, my knowledge is badly dated. I wasn’t 100% sure which planet we saw, until I read this great blog on astronomy here.

Namuamidabu

* – Also, anything that looks like a pig, she also calls “daddy”. Doh.

** – Rule of thumb: stars twinkle, planets don’t. Determining which planet is in the night sky can be a little harder though.