Chatter

I was talking to a father at one of Ben's activity groups this week about his daughter who at 18 months has just a few words.  He was worried.  As it happened, I had just reread this blog post, so my attitude about the same stage with Ben was fresh in my mind.  I told him that we, too, were told we ought to work at being a little less attentive, to pretend we didn't understand what he wanted so as to elicit words, and that I didn't like that kind of deception and didn't do it.  (Instead I prompted him for the word before giving in to whatever it was I already knew he wanted.)

I have no idea if any of what we did or didn't do hurried or delayed his talking schedule.  He had around 50 words at at his 24-month check-up, which I know because we made a list, and it's a pretty entertaining little artifact.  His pediatrician said to give her a call if the summer passed (his birthday is the end of May) without a substantial language explosion, and I remember being a bit concerned even into July, and I don't remember ever thinking, "Oh, here it is: the language explosion!" but I also don't remember reaching the end of the summer and even considering calling the pediatrician.

And now here we are at nearly three, and it's not unusual for people to comment on how articulate and chatty he is.  He's very chatty.  He likes to bust into whatever conversation is happening between me and the check-out clerk or me and the server or me and the FIOS installer to announce apparent non-sequiturs like, "But I have a semt mixoo [cement mixer]!" or once, memorably, to respond to the age question from an enthusiastic waitress, "Two half.  But I have gun!"  (A wooden one Andy made so that Ben would stop stealing his carpenter's square.)

I was never really worried about his language development.  I knew the range of normal was wide, and it was clear from very early that his receptive vocabulary was huge.  But it was one of those things, lurking just beyond the horizon, ready to burst into star-spangled worry at any moment.  Until it wasn't.

Solo-Parent Road Trip

We're just back from a whirlwind trip to Charlottesville for C's triplets' first birthday, with overnight visits in DC and Philadelphia on either end. The "we" in this case is me and Ben, no Andy, and solo-parent road-tripping was surprisingly easy. And by "easy," of course I mean "I didn't even cry once."

The thing that makes it doable is that the kid will sleep in his travel crib in strange places. For a while, that was not the case, and every trip out of town meant each night stacked up the sleeplessness. Now that he sleeps -- and I sleep -- all things are possible.

Another thing that makes it doable is understanding and helpful friends who don't roll their eyes at our arrival with armloads of gear and crap, who make room and help carry and let their schedules work around us a little. You expect it to some degree from other people with babies (or whose kids were babies in recent memory), but it's a wonderful gift from the unbabied.

What makes it fun is that he's a pretty gregarious and outgoing little dude. He genuinely enjoys interacting with people, making faces and getting reactions, so that he's both happy and the source of happiness in others. Rest stops on the Jersey Turnpike, for instance, are not generally a highlight of anybody's travel, but when you walk in hand-in-hand with a grinning toddler who likes to wave his fat little arm at everybody, it can be something of a treat.

I wish I were one of those people who could travel with a toddler and one overnight bag, but I'm just not, and I've made my peace with it.

- clothing and bathroom stuff bag
- diaper bag
- bag of toys
- bag of food, snacks, sippies, plates, and bibs*
- heavy-as-hell bag of travel crib
- Ikea plastic-canvas bag of booster seat and tray
- bag of dvd player and dvds
- stroller

And, sure, I could consolidate some of those bags, but what does it get me to put the toys in the food bag except hassle when I want to carry one and not the other? As it is, I had to shuffle a bunch of stuff to take just the minimal food and diaper gear when we took public transportation into Center City for dinner, since I wasn't about to lug the kid, the stroller, my handbag, and two other large bags up and down subway stairs.

Anyway. Doing this stuff on my own is mostly fine. I'm just organized enough, and just patient enough (though the experimental, let's-push-Mom's-buttons-'cause-I'm-bored shrieking on the Beltway did make me lose my mind briefly), and I like driving, and I like my kid. But it does give me profound respect for single parents of tiny people. Other people can give you help and respite, but not like a co-parent can. I had a wonderful time (and so did Ben), but it sure is nice to be back here where I don't have to change all the diapers.


* I realized after posting that actually I had another food bag, too: a cooler bag with fridge stuff in it. I also had a bag of knitting, but I can hardly blame that on Ben.

Nurse More?

Ben was an enthusiastic on-demand nurser from the get-go, and that worked for me just fine, especially early on when he desperately needed comfort, and nursing was the most effective comfort I could give. At around nine months, though, it occurred to me that I wasn't 100% happy with on-demand nursing anymore. I'm not sure that I can give a particular reason or list of reasons that would logically outweigh whatever reasons someone else might give for continuing. I have reasons, and I will list them, but I think more than anything it just felt to me that he didn't really need it any longer, and I didn't really like it any longer, and that feeling was more of a motivation than any of the reasons I'm about to give.

So here are some of the reasons:

I'm not entirely comfortable with the conflation of eating and comfort past a certain age. I'm sure plenty of people comfort-nurse well into toddlerhood without creating bad eating habits, but there's something about it that bothers me. I didn't want a toddler who fell down and then needed to nurse to regain his composure.

I've never much liked nursing in public. I don't think I'm excessively modest, and I certainly got over my initial squeamishness about it very quickly, but Ben happens to enjoy the eat-a-little-talk-a-little method of breastfeeding, which is mildly irritating at home, but creates a lot of nipple-management issues at, say, the mall.

He's a very good eater of solids, and he's a chunky little dude. I am in no way concerned that he's getting too little good nutrition. In fact, he eats way better than I do, and I believe he gets better nutrients from his plate than at my breast.

Even so, I probably would have continued on-demand nursing if he had put up any kind of fight about moving to a schedule, let alone eliminating feedings from the schedule. He didn't. I realized that he was usually nursing before and after every sleep, plus once overnight, so the first thing I did was experiment with no nursing before naps, which he didn't even seem to notice: no trouble at all. At first he did ask to nurse occasionally (he pokes at my sternum), but didn't appear fazed at my refusing and offering some kind of redirect. So he was now nursing at an early wake-up (around 4:00 or 5:00), again when Andy left for work and handed him over to me (7:00), after each nap (around 10:00 and 2:30), and at bedtime (6:30), and that went on for a couple of months. (I wasn't a total hard-ass about it, either -- if he was sick or having a very hard time with something and wanted to nurse, I let him.)

So last week we were in Wisconsin at Andy's parents', and it occurred to me that with all the distraction and excitement, Ben might not even miss one of the post-nap nursings, so I skipped it and gave him a snack of crackers and milk instead. No problem. (It should be mentioned that this kid is a huge fan of crackers.) So no more nursing after the morning nap, check. And the day before yesterday, I did the same for the afternoon nap, and again, he didn't seem fazed in the slightest.

Now I'm perfectly happy to go on nursing in the morning and at bedtime for as long as he shows the slightest interest. But he threw me a bit of a curveball yesterday: suddenly his enthusiasm for his second morning nursing (the 7:00 one when Andy brings him to me in bed) seemed drastically reduced! He was way more interested in clambering around on the pillows and beating on the wall behind the headboard. I heard the slightest plaintive note in my voice when he squirmed away for the third or fourth time and I asked, "Nurse more, kiddo? Nurse more?"

Lunching

On Saturday, I knew we'd be eating lunch out, so I brought along Ben's sippy cup, a bib, and a bag of dreary-ohs and fruit bits. It's not that I fear for his nutrition if he goes a meal without oaty Os and freeze-dried fruit; it's that the time between sitting down and getting served is easier on everybody if Ben has dozens of little foodlets to pick up and put into his mouth.

I used to bring all his food: overcooked organic veggies and strips of whole-wheat bread, shredded cheese, a banana. And I don't look back on those meals out and think I was a chump to do it -- he was new to solids, and I think it was appropriate to introduce each food carefully, prepare it minimally. But now he's a sturdy little nearly-eleven-month-old Big Fan of Food, and I'm not going to let a little breading scare me.

So we order off the kids' menu now. Chicken fingers and steamed broccoli. I cut it all up into wee pieces and set a few pieces at a time in front of him. The server invariably asks if we want a plate, and I'm sure the sight of a baby eating right off the table is unsettling, but he can handle the germs, and he'd just knock a plate onto the floor.

We didn't plan to eat out again today, but it worked out that way. I didn't have a bib or the snacks, but I did have his sippy cup, and I made a mental note to keep one in my purse from now on -- it's really the only brought-from-home lunch item that we'd miss. He ate his deep-fried, mostly-breading, far-too-salty chicken and steamed-but-drenched-in-saturated-fats-and-salt broccoli, and would I want him to eat like that all the time? No way. But once in a while, no big deal. And it's great to be able to eat lunch at a restaurant on the spur of the moment.

These are not fancy or sophisticated places, of course. Yesterday was Pizzeria Uno at the mall, and today was the Ruby Tuesday across from the Lowe's. His restaurant experiences include Cracker Barrel, Panera, Five Guys (where there isn't, sadly, anything I'm willing to give him -- yet), and a cafe in Albany called Peaches. I want him to be the kind of kid who's used to eating out, who can transition easily to nicer places -- and dinner -- once he's past the chucking-stuff-on-the-floor phase, and it seems to me that the way to get there is through a lot of "family" restaurants with fried food and patience.

We tip generously, at least 30%, to make up for the mess.

Dada, duh.

His first consonant was M: "Um," he'd say, "um." I convinced myself it was when he was asking to nurse, and I'm probably not far off, except that he's more or less always asking to nurse, in that he's never been presented with a boob he didn't immediately avail himself of.

Then it was B: "Bob Bob Bob Bob," he'd say, smashing peas, "Bob." Andy has an uncle Bob, but Ben has never met him.

Then D: "Da-da-da-da!" he exclaims, having followed the ball and captured it, "Da!" But his vowel sounds are expanding now, too, and so sometimes we also get an emphatic "Duh!" And there are times I swear he says "Doi" in exactly the tone a teenager might, to express weary frustration with her interlocutor's ignorance.

No one in grocery stores or waiting rooms had anything to say about Bob, but boy do I hear about Da. "They always say Dada first," the crones insist on telling me, in tones of deepest sympathy, "but Mama will come."

"It's not a word," I say, because I'm pigheaded enough to argue the point rather than just nod and smile. "He's just making the sound."

He says it with relish and delight when encountering the dogs ("Da!"), with engaged curiosity when encountering new objects ("Da?"). He greets most people with it, which means that maybe a third of the men we encounter get awkward and sheepish and stammer something about not being his dad. (Doi, dude.) "Don't worry," I say, "He says 'da-da' to bananas and his feet, too."

It was a thoroughly goofy artistic movement, Dada, the sort of thing everybody should think was fabulous in high school and then immediately get over. It doesn't get an "-ism", either (no matter what Wikipedia says), so you can cut that right out (Alex Trebek, I'm looking at you). I haven't thought about Man Ray so often since high school.

"LHOOQ," I tell Ben in lousy French, "It's a pun."

Cute

The delights of parenthood are manifold, but one is being told your kid is cute. Other people, I understand, don't necessarily like talking to strangers in the grocery store. I'm gregarious. I like random interactions with my fellow man. And when the interactions are baby-based effusive praise, I'm all over it like a cheap suit.

"Look at those cheeks," they'll say, or, "Oh my goodness, how cute," or "Hello, handsome!" (He is infrequently mistaken for a girl, despite my generally dressing him in gender-neutral rather than explicitly boyish clothes. He has a dark purple cabled sweater, though, which increases his odds of mistaken gender by about 31%.) Sometimes they stop to ask his age and talk to him a little. Unless he's in an unusually gleeful mood, he responds with a level stare until they stick around long enough to pass whatever test he's clearly running, because after a minute or two, he opens up his can of HUGE ADORABLE BABY SMILE. Then I have to peel them off or they'd follow us home.

A couple of the deli guys and one of the check-out girls at the smaller of our two grocerias know him by name now, as does the nice lady at the yarn store and one of the tellers at the bank inside the other grocery. I remember this phenomenon; it was the same when Lola was a puppy and we lived in Powelton Village and walked her around the neighborhood a lot. Babies -- even (or maybe especially) baby dogs -- are the best possible calling cards to introduce you to a community.

It's one of the things I'm cherishing about his babyhood because I know full well it won't last. Before I know it, he'll be three and catastrophically emptying shelves at the grocery and having a tantrum at the yarn store and asking the bank teller if her penis came in yet.

Cartography: Never Stop at Once

We'd been in sort of a limbo, cart-wise. The kid used to stay in his baby bucket, which would be snapped out of the carseat base and clicked onto the metal seat-back of the grocery cart (trust me, it works great) to be wheeled around Target or the grocery. But then he outgrew the bucket (actually the weight of him + bucket just got to be too much for my wrists) and we switched it for the Britax giganto carseat which does not snap out because it weighs four million pounds and is the size of a Volkswagen. So then he had to be carried, put in the Ergo, or strollered -- none of which work terribly well for Target and the grocery, especially when the adult is flying solo.

But then he started sitting up, and we thought, "Woo-hoo! He can sit up in the grocery cart like a little kid!" Except he hated it and made his feelings known in no uncertain terms (the terms in question being sustained screaming). Until today, when suddenly the cart was A-OK. He sat up, looked around, chewed on the cart a little (T-minus a cold's incubation period ... ), and was perfectly content to be wheeled around in state as befits an adorable despot.

Which just goes to show: never stop at once. The first time for everything almost always goes badly. Hell, the second and third time probably goes badly. But at some point, without warning, the kid will change his mind, and suddenly the avocado/grocery cart/cloth blocks will be a big hit.

Yakkety-Yak

I think it was Penelope Leach I was reading -- anyway, the author of a parenting book was exhorting parents to talk to their babies, and to overcome feelings of embarrassment or weirdness if talking to an infant didn't come naturally to them, and for a moment I couldn't figure out what she was talking about. Embarrassment? About talking to another human? Does not compute.

But it was only a moment, and then I remembered: oh, yeah, I am a compulsive talker. I talk to my dogs. I talk to myself. A solo trip to the grocery is likely to provoke half a dozen comments to no one in particular along the lines of, "What kind of crap outfit runs out of organic yellow mustard?" Not muttered under my breath, but spoken aloud, with gusto, as if talking to an imaginary friend who might be ten or fifteen feet away. Occasionally actual humans are nearby, and assume I'm talking to them, and respond, which always takes me aback a little. I wasn't talking to you, buddy -- what am I, a crazy person, to talk to random strangers? That's not strictly true, either: I'm running a monologue, but in fact I'm delighted if strangers bust in.

So I'm happy to know that this borderline-creepy mania of mine is positively encouraged by experts in child development. Apparently language acquisition has a lot to do with general capability, and the more different words a kid hears before age three, the more likely he is to be good at things like algebra and holding down a job. In fact, this is why experts want people to read to their kids; it's not so much about books or reading per se, so much as it's about exposing the kid to words that may not be in the parents' vocabularies.

My "conversations" with Ben these days are maybe one part thinking aloud slash grocery list, one part description of what's going on (recommended by parenting experts as the sort of talk babies develop an interest in soonest), one part babble, and one part conscious use of multisyllabic, big-vocabulary words. Viz: "We're at Ikea, Ben. Mom loves Ikea. Mom misses Ikea since we moved to the damnable hinterlands. We're walking past glasses, Ben: wine glasses and juice glasses and beer glasses and I don't know what those glasses are for. Those glasses are preposterous, Ben. Those glasses are absurd and improbable. Mom needs to find table lamps, Ben. Yes Mom does. Yes Mom does. Yes Mom does."

One of these days, a tiny person -- not a stranger -- is going to bust into this monologue and turn it into a conversation, and I'm going to be so delighted I might just be speechless. For a second.

Drag

I was in Philadelphia this weekend visiting friends on the other side of the gulf. For Sunday, the only full day I was to be in town, I had made plans to meet friends for two events: coffee at La Colombe followed by walking around in Center City, and early dinner at Pho '75.

For both events, the friends meeting us were about 45 minutes late. Under normal circumstances -- normal, in this case, being me pre-Ben, the me they're all used to (I moved away whole pregnant) -- no big deal. I might have noticed and been concerned about their safety or about confusion over location, but that's about it. With the baby in tow, though, those 45 minutes meant something else, something bigger, something I wouldn't ever expect them to be able to anticipate and so can't in any way blame them for not avoiding. Which is to say, I want to talk about it because it's an excellent example of the gulf, but I don't want any of the people involved (who constitute a significant proportion of my reading public) either to think I'm pissed off at them or to be pissed off at me.

So let me break it down. I want to be a calm person, capable of interaction and fun, and I want my kid to be happy and pleasant to be around. The best way -- in fact, the only way -- for that to happen is for the interaction to take place as soon as possible after A) a nap and B) a meal. From the moment the kid wakes up and comes off the nipple, the clock is ticking on his mood. The first hour is gravy: almost guaranteed great mood. Smiles, self-entertainment, total propaganda baby. He is at his most pleasant and, if even pleasant babies aren't your cup of tea, his most ignorable during this stage.

After an hour, things get iffy. Sometimes I can turn the crab around by nursing him, but nursing itself can make plenty of childless people uncomfortable, and my aim here is to make things more comfortable for all of us. After two hours, even if I've managed to nurse him, keeping the crab at bay requires active intervention: walking, bouncing, holding and retrieving toys, etc., and even those things may not work. And even if they do, I can't help but be aware that though he may be distracted from his discomfort, my kid is now uncomfortable.

If we're in public, especially in a place like a restaurant, where my kid pitching a fit has an impact on other people trying to enjoy themselves, I am constantly aware of the impending need to decamp suddenly, interrupting the meals of everybody in my party, if the crab becomes without warning a full-on hysterical scream-fest, the likelihood of which increases with every minute.

If it happens to be bedtime, then this kind of distraction and prolonging of wakefulness is also just about guaranteeing that he's not going to fall asleep easily, or sleep well -- which means I may not have the two or three hours of evening freedom his early bedtime allows me, nor the luxurious four-hour stretches of sleep between feedings that come with undisturbed sleep for him.

So the bottom line is those 45 minutes bit a significant chunk out of my ability both to enjoy those visits and to be myself enjoyable.

All of this is hardly news to anyone who has ever parented a five-month-old. And none of it would have occurred to me before I had one myself. And more than that, even after hearing the (tedious) explanation, I'm not at all sure that my reaction wouldn't have been a little impatient and judgey: uptight parent, can't just go with the flow a little, what a drag. Which is exactly what I don't want my friends to think I've become, which is exactly why I picked times and places carefully and shaped naptimes and nursings as best I could to avoid a situation in which I would have to become uptight parent who can't go with the flow. What a drag.