A Toddler at Night as Predicted by Material Science

A few days ago, at around 8:00 pm, my 17-month-old daughter was standing in the living room, when she suddenly began to spin herself in circles in an effort to induce dizziness and fall down.  She seemed to enjoy it a lot.  After a few nice, relatively harmless tumbles, she eventually made herself so dizzy, that she fell, smacking her face directly onto the hardwood floor.  At that moment, the “witching hour” ended with a brief fit of crying, and it was time for bed.

As a parent of a toddler, I am beginning to see the importance of recognizing toddler fatigue.  The witching hour is an unofficial domain of time where an otherwise normal child goes bananas.  Imagine how a prison inmate gradually loses his mind in isolation over a period of months, and condense that experience into one hour, and you begin to depict the decline of a toddler in the evening.  For my daughter, this strange yet entertaining timeframe seems to occur between the end of dinner and bedtime.