A Trip to the Park

Okay, those last two photos weren't from the park.  We were actually looking for the shuttle train that runs next to our house.   It didn't come, which explains Elliot's expression of bemusement.

On the way to the CSA

This was the first time we managed to get Elliot to wear sunglasses.

He didn't last long in them:

Exercise in the crib

Wait for the big denouement at the end....

Language

His language is really growing by leaps and bounds.  We can ask him pretty much anything and he will do it.  His frustration definitely comes from not being able to talk.  He points and stuff and babbles, and it is clear that he saying something very specific.  But we have no idea what it is.  And when we respond with quizzical looks he just shrieks like a tiny banshee.

He circles around to books he hasn't read in months.  Ollie, which was one of his favorites when he was 6 months old, fell out of favor for a while.  But now he loves to read it, and he recites certain repetitive phrases as we go along:  "Tug tug tug" as the mother elephant uproots the tree; "clumpity-clump" as Ollie goes down to the river; "Run run run" as Ollie scampers back with his brilliant idea;  "Hooray" (pronounced "RAY!") after Ollie sprays his overheated mother with water; and of course "The End".

Last week we were skyping with Kate and Ed on Father's Day, and as we were signing off Hannah said "Elliot, can you say 'I love you' to grandpa?"   Elliot proceeded to say something that had three syllables and sounded a lot like that dog in the pizza commercial who says I love you.

In case you weren't born between 1970 and 1980, this is what I'm talking about.

And yes, for those born between 1980 and 1990, the Beastie Boys did sample that for Sure Shot.

ANYWAY.

I think he's doing a lot of imitating.  When he's in a good mood, just up from a nap, he can reproduce almost any series of syllables you throw at him.   Why is it impossible for the meaning of the words to follow their pronunciation?

Actually, this parallels some of the ideas in a great essay on children and race by a friend of ours, Larry Hirschfield.  One of the findings from child development data is that at a very young age children understand that categories of race exist, even before they understand what criteria are used to sort people into each racial category.  Furthermore, they know which race is privileged by society and which is not, even though they don't know which of their peers fall into each group.


In the same way, this may be how kids learn language --- by imitating the sounds first, and learning the meaning later.  


Fake it 'til you make it, as a much-beloved healthcare activist used to tell me. 

How Elliot Runs

God, that innocence.  The excitement over a bottle of juice.  

He hands it to me and says "moe," then toddles behind me into the kitchen.   He's slightly unsteady on his feet, not so much in the side-to-side anymore, but he still has trouble with the front-to-back.   It’s stopping that gives him trouble: he overshoots his mark and whacks a cheek into a drawer, or leans back on his heels and ends up plopping onto his bottom.

But once we arrive in the kitchen, navigating the twists and turns of the hallway, and he does manage to come to a full stop without falling down, he’s thrilled with himself.  

He holds both arms out full length in front of him and slaps the palms together.  This motion twists him slightly sideways, turning him an eighth of a rotation, and he goes with it, falling into the centrifugal force and letting it carry him the full 360 degrees.

This has the effect of increasing his excitement:  he just did a full spin!  This is going to be the best juice ever!  He looks up at me excitedly --- did you see that? --- and sees that I did see it, and that’s even more exciting!  He takes two steps forward and slaps both palms hard against the front of the dishwasher, leaning into it, and it produces a sound I wouldn’t have expected possible from a baby less than two years old.

Goodbye to Ding Dong

Elliot has grown quite attached to this pretty kitty.  I know I haven't posted many photos of Ding Dong or written about her, but she's been living with us for the past three weeks while Irina was on vacation  (in Croatia!).  And during that time Elliot has gotten quite accustomed to having her around.

We may have issues with his biting other kids (yes we do) and his hitting us when he gets mad (yes we do), but we have absolutely no problems with his treatment of animals.  He reaches out a gentle hand to Ding Dong, pets her, and squats down to press his lips against her back.

He also loves her litter box.  It's this rotating device that auto-separates soiled litter from clean, and deposits the poopy-uriney chunks in a separate compartment --- all without any human contact!  It's triggered by her weight on the steps up to the litter box!  Amazing!

Anyway, we're all very sad to see Ding Dong go.  She will be back one day, I'm sure.  And until then we will think fondly of her.

Dream of an Orange Marker

Profiling

One thing fascinating about taking a baby out in public: it's a Rorschach test.  The way someone responds to a baby will tell you a lot about them.

Get on a subway in New York with a baby strapped to your chest, and sit down next to someone.  What do they do?

It's not as uniform as I would have predicted in my pre-fatherhood days.  I thought everyone cooed and smiled.  Waved and played peekaboo.  I thought that was the generally agreed upon response to an adorable baby.

But that's not actually how everyone responds.  The range of responses is huuuuuuge.

Some people totally ignore him.  Even when Elliot is looking at them --- even when he reaches out an arm toward their iPhone, even when he shouts at them, they refuse to look over.

But that's rare.  More common are the people who know what the socially appropriate response is, but don't want to enact it.  Some are just nervous talking or gesturing on a quiet subway car filled with sullen commuters.  Others are virtually paralyzed by performance anxiety.  They are torn -- sometimes it's agonizingly obvious --- by competing impulses to act cute for the baby and simultaneously sit quietly in a public place.

Not that I don't understand their dilemma.  It is a little weird when a man in a grey pinstriped suit starts making high squeaky noises at Elliot on the Manhattan-bound 4/5 train.  I love it. . . but it is a little weird.

Young men can sometimes have interesting responses.  Elliot has a habit of staring sullenly at people on the train, even after they smile and coo at him, and certain young guys take this the wrong way.  These guys watch Elliot, and look away, and look back, and fidget, and smile nervously.  I can tell they'd rather just go back to staring at their iPhones, but instead they go out on a limb and say "Hi," and make a waving motion with their hands.

And when Elliot doesn't respond, they kind of die inside.  I can see it.  They were hoping for a big broad toothy adorable baby smile, but they get absolutely nothing, and it's like throwing formaldehyde on them.   I just stand there and watch these dudes wither in front of me, they are so crushed.  I want to reach out and grab them by the shoulder and shout "He's a baby!  He's not some chick you went up to in a bar, man!"

But the demographic I find most fascinating --- the one I have taken to cataloging, the ones I'm on the verge of interviewing --- are women.

I am fairly confident that, based on a woman's initial response to seeing Elliot on the subway, I tell you with a moderate degree of accuracy what that woman's childbearing status is.

Young women, in their teens and 20s, smile at him with this innocent, Aren't Babies Adorable smile.  Also, there's a hint of: One Day I Will Meet a Man Just Like That.  There's no complication in the smile, there's no nostalgia or regret or bittersweetness.  It's all joy.

A woman who has a child, now or in the past, gives us a knowing smile.  There's some of that same Aren't Babies Adorable thing, but there's also a wistfulness: you can see them traveling off in their mind.  Memories are engaged, and there's a sudden desire to go back to that time.  He wasn't such a bad baby, was he?  He had moments like this, quiet and content in his carrier....maybe i should consider....  But that train of thought gets shut down pretty quickly.

There's a category of women who just ignore him, even when he's shouting in their faces.  I lump them in with the Ignorers of any gender I mentioned above.

But in between smiling and ignoring lies a category of women who have a very complicated reaction to Elliot.  They are often in their late thirties or forties, but they can be younger.   These women will look at him and interact, coo, peekaboo, whatever, but there's a sadness to it.   You can tell their hearts are not in it, and you can watch flashes of sorrow come through the ostensible cheerfulness.

I don't want to jump to conclusions about who these women are.   I'm sure they are a heterogeneous group:  they were unable to have children despite trying; they experienced the death of a child; they lost custody of a child.  Or maybe they just chose not to have children and they regret it.

The impulse to interview these women comes out of a desire to answer these questions.  Who are you?  What happened to make you respond to a baby this way?

Of course, I have no evidence to back up any of these conclusions.  I have never actually interviewed anyone I stood next to in a subway car.  I have used the scientific method to confirm exactly zero of these observations.  I acknowledge that everything I've said above could be completely dead wrong.

But Copernicus never got in a spaceship and saw for himself that the earth was round.  He just predicted it.  And he was right.

Is that an egotistical way to end this?

Old MacDonald

He had a farm, in case you didn't already know.  Watch this one to the end to find out more. 

Photo Booth!

June 2011

Updates on Elliot

He's been doing dizzy spins for a while.   There's a video of that, I think I just posted it.  But the video doesn't show him doing ten spins at once and falling down laughing.

The stutter step, that's a good one.   If you tell him to go get something, and it's only three normal steps away, he'll stutter step to make the journey more momentous.  

He's doing a lot of laughing.  He finds certain books hil-AR-ious.  The second page of Goodnight Moon, for example:  "Three little bears sitting on chairs".  It's so funny he has to run away for five seconds, and then come back and slam both hands against the page.  

Last week he couldn't sleep.  He woke up crying at about 3am.  So I went in and filled his empty bottle with water.  I should have changed his diaper too, but I was exhausted so I didn't.  Inevitably, at 5am he woke up again, this time soaking in urine.

I went back in the room (Hannah was sick with a fever --- yeah it was a fun night) and it was already getting light.  That's something Elliot has taught me: in June it's light at 5am.  I picked him up and his diaper was soaked.


When I laid him on the changing table he thought we were up for the day, and he was happy about that.  He lay there contently and let me change him, thinking we were about to go play together.


I will never forget the look of betrayal and anger on his face when I started to lower him back into the crib.  There was a long silent pause as he inhaled --- followed by a tooth-rattling, ear-jattling scream that I heard all the way back to bed.  

Goodnight Moon and Dizzy

Video Monitor

Baby Computer Game

It arose out of a need to keep Elliot from messing with our laptops.  He kept fiddling with them, banging on the keys and inducing strange alterations.  For example, he turned on the "disabled" function on my laptop --- and in this case the disability was impaired hearing.  Every time I did something the computer would annouce "opening file" in a loud voice.  

So we bought these baby computer programs because they lock out the keyboard: once you start them, the kid can smack the keys all the day long and it has no effect on the rest of the computer.

The inadvertent side effect was for Elliot to fall in love with Humpty Dumpty.   He walks around holding the cardboard box that the game came in, pointing to Mr. Dumpty and saying "Dumpty" over and over.  

This particular video features Elliot playing his computer game and dancing along to "London Bridge is Falling Down."  Due to excessive ambient noise (i.e. the sounds of the bricks of London Bridge falling) you can't really pick out that tune.  Just trust me. 

Photo Booth!

May 2011 wedding

Pram

You may remember how we scored a sweet old-timey pram at Value Village outside Ann Arbor.  We always planned to promenade about Brooklyn and make ourselves the envy of the neighbors.  But it was such a large, unwieldy contraption that we never got around to doing it. 

The pram headed back to Ann Arbor a few weeks ago, but before it went we did manage to get Elliot in it and take a few photos:

Dainty Elliot

He’s such a dainty little man. 

Today at breakfast he sat in his high chair, happily shoveling up Cream of Wheat, plowing the short spoon through the gooey cereal, letting the stuff creep up the stem, practically sinking his fist in the bowl.  And then taking that overloaded spoon and cramming it in his craw. 

Of course it was too much.  Elliot, of course it was. 

It glopped down onto his hand, it spilled out of his mouth onto his chin.  Oblivious, he plowed that spoon through the CoW field again, and again filled his little mouth, swallowing intently, not exactly happy but well-occupied, focused, content.

It took him at least five spoonfuls before he realized what had happened:  Hey, I’m covered in cereal! 

He dropped the spoon.  He looked at me accusingly.  How could you let this happen?

Out stretched the little CoW-covered hand, and there it waited, horizontal, entitled.  

I knew my task.  Like a eunuch scraping with bent back toward his Roman emperor, I approached the high chair.  I wiped the offended hand thoroughly with a tissue. 

Elliot bent his elbow, examined the hand --- and then straightened it again, highlighting a spot I missed.  I wiped further.

(I am not making this up.)

And his daintiness is not limited to the dining table.  Sometimes it seems that he is chiding us for our poor housekeeping skills. 

He often toddles about the house barefoot.  A few days ago he squirmed off my lap and headed over to knock some DVDs off the television stand and break them in half. 

Suddenly he paused in midstride. 

He sat down and began maneuvering his tiny fingers into the even-tinier spaces between his toes.  He worked at it for ten or fifteen seconds --- intensely focused, delicate work, like eye surgery or grabbing that one nose hair that just won’t cooperate.

When he’d found what he was looking for, he stood up, turned around and came back to me.  I offered a scooped palm to accept what was in his outstretched hand.

It turned out to be a fragment of a Cheerio, shrunken and firm like a woodchip.  Once it was safely in my hand, he turned and strode back to his task.

One could not help but interpret that as a passive-aggressive attack against the cleanliness of our floor. 

Or maybe I’m over-analyzing?