Dog, Dad, That, This -- Cracker!

Walking is unmistakable. Either you can put one foot in front of the other, not hold on to anything, and propel yourself, or you can't. Ben did it for the first time last weekend, and despite much celebration on all our parts, seems to have lost enthusiasm for bipedality (a not-uncommon reaction to first steps, apparently) and regained considerable gusto for crawling. Which is fine.

But talking is such a judgment call. I had him at the pediatrician for his one-year physical, and she asked if he has any words, and I said No because we don't think he does, really, but who knows? He says "dah" about a lot of things, and it's entirely possible that one or two or six uses of "dah" are actual words. Certainly he never uses another sound or syllable for Dog, or for Dad. He says "diss" in a way that suggests "this" to me, to go along with another use of "dah" for "that." Sometimes he says stuff that sounds an awful lot like "cacka" when he's very excited about getting a cracker (which is pretty much any time he's about to get a cracker -- kid likes crackers), but he doesn't do it consistently (sometimes he just says "dah! dah! dah!"), and he won't do it when prompted.

He has considerable receptive language, and he certainly communicates his desires very well by pointing and "dah"-ing. When asked, he can point to such varied and useful items as his toes, his mouth, his hair, Mom's belly, a dog, a ceiling fan, a window, peas, pineapple, and probably a couple dozen other quotidian things. When I've told him not to bug sleeping Lola, he points to her and shakes his head sagely.

Do I sound like I'm making excuses? Early expressive language is a marker of intelligence. I was an early talker. But really, it's not that. I'm not concerned that this child will be a dullard. It's just that I talk to him all day, every day, and I'm so eager for another voice to join in and make it a conversation. And it's such a huge and crucial part of personhood, and watching him become a person is an addictive delight.

Comfortable Faces

In the house I think of as "the house I grew up in" (even though I lived in four different houses from infancy to college, and this one no longer than the others), one wall of the family room was covered in photographs. They were arranged in three not-quite-separate columns: on the left was my dad's family, on the right was my mom's, and in the middle was the three of us.

I loved that wall of photographs. I loved that I knew the names of all the people and how they were related to me. I loved that visitors always seemed interested and wanted to know who was who. There was something essentially comforting about that mass of images, and I've been wanting to recreate it in my own house for years.

I've asked my mom for photos, and she's brought sheaves on various visits. When we were in Wisconsin last week, Andy's mom covered the dining room table in boxes and albums, and we sorted through them all evening, picking ones to take home with us -- not to keep, but to scan and return. We've already framed and hung a few of my family; now we can do the same for Andy's. And we scanned a bunch of my family, too, and posted dozens of each on my Flickr site and sent links to relatives. I hope everyone enjoys them, and I really hope that they feel moved to cough up some photos of their own which can also be scanned and returned.

I've picked the dining room as our family gallery. The walls don't lend themselves to the three-column approach; also, I prefer a more scattered look. But there's lots of space to fill, and I look forward to picking and grouping, framing and hanging. I don't suffer the delusion that Ben will share all my interests and pleasures, so it won't surprise (or, I hope, disappoint) me if he isn't eager to memorize all the names and faces, if he doesn't find them the comfort I always did. But there's a (silly? superstitious?) part of me that feels that the people in those pictures want to watch over us, want to get a look at my kid growing up, and that I somehow wouldn't be doing right by my ancestors if I didn't festoon the place with their faces.

(Andy's paternal grandparents Etta and Bernard, my mother Betsy in my grandmother Helen's arms with my aunt Sylvia, Andy's uncle Bob and mother Kath, my aunts Nina and Elaine with my dad Stanley)

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?"

Road Trip

We spent Ben's first birthday with Andy's folks in Wisconsin, which means that we spent four very long days (12 hours, give or take) on the road with a 12-month-old. And it went about as well as four 12-hour days in the car with a 12-month-old could possibly go, I must say.

On the advice of friends, we bought a portable dvd player and a dohickey to hang it from the front seats, and when it came time to pull out the big guns, I have never been so glad to kiss goodbye my formerly strong opinion that videos in cars are one of the things wrong with Kids Today. Without the magic trance-inducer, we'd have to have added another day to the trip each way, without a doubt. (Our dvds, in case you were dying to know, were They Might Be Giants' ABCs and 123s, and Yo Gabba Gabba.)

The other sine qua non of the trip was stopping for actual meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's tough to abandon a driving lifetime of honed road-trip tactics (the drive-through, the you-pee-while-I-get-gas, the lap snacks rather than meals), and it's really tough to feel that hour or hour and a half tick by, knowing that every minute is another minute you're going to be stuck in the car at the other end. But babies aren't roadtrippers, and the kid needed to stretch his baby legs and look at the crap on the walls of the Cracker Barrel instead of the back of a headrest for a while. And I do recommend Cracker Barrel. The vegetables are awful, but the rest of the menu is very tasty and very inexpensive. I can't think of another chain that's as ubiquitous and reliable without being also terrible or overpriced.

The real lesson of the trip, though, is don't take a baby on an eleven-hundred-mile road trip if you can possibly avoid it. Plane travel has its pitfalls and problems -- the expense springs to mind, along with the hell of being the one responsible for the crying baby making everyone else unhappy -- but I think it still might beat four 12-hour days in the car. Best of all, of course, is when it's their turn to come to you.

Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!

Ben has enjoyed paging through his big photo books (especially this one and this one) for a while now, but it's mostly been clear that his pleasure has had more to do with the hinge-motion of the pages than observing the pictures. But recently he's made the mental leap and is able to recognize that the images correspond to real-world objects and creatures.

At least, if they're dogs.

We have two basset hounds, Lola and Hugo, and as I mentioned here, I first noticed he'd acquired some receptive language when I named the dogs and he looked at them. He likes them both very much, and the feelings are decidedly mutual. So it's no surprise that they continue to open developmental doors for him.

This latest started with the basset hound calendar in the kitchen, which was the first image Ben got excited about, first grinning and then pointing and grinning, wanting to be taken closer so that he could smack at the image, possibly making sure there wasn't really a doggy behind it somewhere. Then he and I were paging through one of his picture books, and he pointed at a photo of a dog: "Dah!" This dog wasn't a basset hound. And then he pointed at a bear and a wolf and a cougar. So, ok, we haven't exactly narrowed down what a dog is, but bears and cougars aren't that far off, and wolves are just dogs whose ancestors -- rather shortsightedly -- resisted the appeal of human garbage heaps. Which of course makes me think about how I know a wolf from a bear from a dog, how infinitely complicated those distinctions are, what a miracle it is that my not-quite-year-old can do it, how essential this kind of detailed visual sorting must be to human evolutionary success.

And then the thing that really knocked me out: he pointed out the doggy in an illustrated book. And not a photorealistic illustration, rather a stylized one (in Dav Pilkey's The Paperboy). This dog isn't a basset hound, either, but it is a low-rider and a bit of a fatty, so similar. Still, how does the kid know? What markers of dogness do his real dogs share with this painting? In the time before photography, did it take longer for babies to recognize images? Do photographs create a kind of visual bridge between the real and the imagined?

When her first child was around Ben's age, my friend C. asked me for photos of Lola, who was a puppy at the time. (I believe I sent her prints -- decent images were probably too big to email eight years ago, and there was no such thing as Flickr.) She was making a doggy picture book for her son. I loved the idea, and loved that she wanted to include Lola. Last week, I made one for Ben, with photos of our dogs, dogs we know, and lots of dogs from the Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! pool at Flickr. (Scotch photo laminating sheets are awesome.)

He loves it.

Happy

There was a vase of daisies on the counter this morning with a note attached: "Happy Mother's Day" in block letters, and beneath some scratches in crayon that could only have been the very first artistic product of my pride and joy.

We ate lunch at the Cracker Barrel, my favorite kid-friendly chain place (two words: hashbrown casserole), along with half the population of the Capital District and their moms. Ben had his first buttermilk biscuits and first grilled-cheese sandwich, both big hits. I grinned (probably inappropriately) at a couple of hugely pregnant women who reminded me of me this time last year.

Andy elected to skip the Lowe's because I find it tedious, and instead we did pleasurable-to-me errands including a leisurely wander through a nice nursery with iced coffees. And yesterday -- part of the Mothers' Day extravaganza, though it was more or less a coincidence -- I got a haircut and highlights and a brow wax and went bra shopping and ate lunch with a book.

And for dinner we ate Five Guys take-out, one of my favorite meals, and not just because I don't have to cook it or even go get it.

It was a very nice weekend. Maybe I like Mothers' Day after all.

Martyrs' Day

I've never liked Valentine's Day. When I was single, it just made me feel conspicuous and lonely. When I was first dating somebody, it was awkward. In an established relationship, it feels canned and corny to do something romantic on one prescribed day. It makes me feel that the relationship is empty if romantic gestures have to be prescribed, if expressions of passion and tenderness are things to avoid shirking rather than extemporaneous outlets of genuine feeling. I'm not sure yet if I feel the same about Mothers' Day. I have a feeling that I will, though, since it's kind of the same deal: being told I'm loved and appreciated because today is the day for it just makes me feel unloved and taken for granted.

I was talking to friends the other day, and one woman expressed outrage at an acquaintance's husband's failure to thank his wife properly (by celebrating Mothers' Day properly) for raising his children, giving up her career to stay home with them, and so forth. It took me aback. I stay home with my kid, but it wouldn't occur to me to feel martyred about it. For one thing, I didn't give up anything meaningful to do it. But if I'd been invested in a career, I would have made a choice about working or not working that was mine to make, and I'd have owned it. More than that, I see my ability to stay home with Ben as a luxury provided by Andy. Not only do I not think he should be especially grateful to me for staying home, I think I should be grateful to him. And most importantly, I never want Ben to think that parenting him the way I chose to was anything other than what I wanted.

Which is not to say that being the at-home parent of a baby or toddler isn't full of drudgery and mostly thankless. It is. When Andy performs particularly well at his job, it's because he overcame an interesting challenge, and he gets praise from people whose opinions he respects. When I perform particularly well at mine, it's because I overcame Ben's crabbiness and got the grocery shopping done and dinner on the table, and nobody but me tends to notice.

So if there's a part of Mothers' Day I might actually cherish, it's being told in all seriousness by someone whose opinion I respect that what I do matters, and that I'm good at it. And even so, if I only hear it once a year, it's just going to piss me off.