We've been playing a variant of object peek-a-boo today. Bridget sitting on a lap, with toy in front of her; toy draped in muslin (and it has to be draped, not hidden behind a held-up muslin, as we've done before); muslin whipped off to the cry 'There it is!'

This is - quite literally, for Bridget - just the funniest thing ever, however many times we do it. She has been cackling and howling and screaming and almost crying with laughter. She has been getting to the point where even twitching the muslin makes her laugh. Sometimes even just reaching for the muslin.

Almost unbearably adorable.

I was talking to someone a while ago about language development, and she was talking about when it is that word recognition kicks in. The example she used was that of sitting a baby in front of pictures of, say, dogs and elephants (I can't remember the exact example used) and saying the relevant word - and seeing if the baby showed an inclination towards the animal named. I don't know the details of the experiment, so don't know quite how the 'inclination' was supposed to be demonstrated.

This struck me as fine - but as rather limited. It seem to be based on the idea that the first bits of language that a baby would pick up would be names of simple objects. This seems to me very likely to be mistaken. I would have thought that the first sorts of words that a baby would be likely to pick up would be words deeply and regularly embedded in frequently repeated activities. Words like 'goodnight' (a set of sounds Bridget only hears in one context, but which she hears in that context every day) or 'hello' or 'yum'. At what stage might a baby register surprise or amusement or confusion if her parents came into the nursery to get her up in the morning calling out 'Goodbye'? At what stage would it be funny to have Mummy come into the room calling out 'Yellow' instead of 'Hello'?

Bridget clearly responds differently to different tones of voice - and has done for some time. But there is no sign that content matters, yet. So I can still soothe her by reading whatever theology book I happen to have close at hand to her in the right tone of voice. I'm guessing that won't last...

After profound and subtle rumination, I have reached a staggering insight. There is a difference between delight and anxiety!

And, more to the point, there's a difference between the kind of developmental information which leads to anxiety, and the kind that leads to delight.

We have, for instance, an great little book on the first twelve months of a baby's development - the main point of which is a whole load of suggestions for games to try at different points. But it suffers from two flaws. One of them is a massively over-regimented approach: the way the graphics are set out makes it look like you're meant to have a pretty fixed timetable of activities (OK, Bridget, now it's time for 20 minutes of games which focus on cognitive development; remember that after the break it will be thirty minutes of motor skills. Did you bring your gym bag?) But the other is that, by going for a neat month-by-month story, it drops you into pits of anxiety whenever you realise that your baby doesn't do something that's on this month's list. I've stopped reading the 'month-by-month' sections, and simply concentrate on trying new games.

On the other hand, I can't get enough of a different kind of information. The kind that says: 'Do you see your baby doing x? Well, here's some of what that means. And here's some of what it is going to lead to, some time soon.' That's the kind of information which makes for delight.

By railing incontinently against 'milestones, targets and standards', I muddied the waters between these two. Looking around a bit at how the language is used, though, it seems that 'milestones' language normally applies to the latter, delight-inducing stuff.