QiuQiu through the looking glass

QQ has had a fascination with mirrors ever since we first picked her up in China. Any reflective surface will serve...the oven door, a pair of sunglasses, the back of a spoon. In the beginning, when she had no interest in toys, a pocket-sized mirror would entertain her for an hour. And it's not just curiosity: she really quite admires her own image. It makes her smile, laugh out loud, even. If she sees her image, be it in a mirror, on a camera screen, on the computer or in a photograph, she wants to touch it, grin at it, pat it a little...then she wants to hand it to us so we can admire it, too.

Recently, however, her interest in mirrors has expanded. She figured out one day a few weeks ago that she could see more of the room in the mirror if she craned her neck. In fact, if she presses her face against the glass, she can see most of the room. And if she really stretches, she can often find mommy or daddy in that mirror-room. That's her absolute favorite. Man, does she get excited. She giggles and dimples and jiggles up and down. If the mirror-mommy or daddy waves at her from inside the mirror-room, that's especially delightful.

Whatever she sees in the mirror that's new, she has to take a step back and check the "real world" room to see if it's the same.

Then she compares the two. I wonder if she ever finds a discrepancy?
It takes me back to the days after I read "Alice Through The Looking Glass" for the first time (I was much older, of course), and I used to do exactly what QQ does, crane my neck to see as much of the mirror room as I possibly could. It's a bit of an eerie story for a child, and I remember there was always a faint tensing of my body as I searched...a frisson of dread that I might find some small thing that did not match up. I both dreaded and hoped to find that discrepancy, of course.

Ooops, lost her train of thought. Here, she is distracted by the beauty of her own mirror face, and she has to give herself a little high-five for being so stinkin' cute.

Here she is trying to find mirror-mommy again.

Although it's less interesting if mirror-mommy has the camera in front of her face and is not waving back. Then QQ tends to get distracted by other things, like mirror-shoes and mirror-books. Gotta check the details for continuity.

...making sure National Geo Adventure, the real-life version, looks the same as the mirror-version.

Mirror-world mommy and QQ.
...oh, and that checking thing? She does that with the camera as well. She learned within our first few days in China that once we snapped a picture of her, the image could be reviewed on the digital screen. After every few photos, to this day, she comes over and grabs the camera with her strong little hand, turning it so that she can see on the review screen how good she looked a few seconds earlier. Amazing, modern technology.