Birthday Party in Fort Greene Park

Megan was our doula, and she's one of the coolest people I know.  She took the amazing photos of Elliot and Hannah and me below.

This happened a while ago and you probably all saw the photos on Facebook, but I figured I would get them up here for posterity.

There was a pinata:

And cake:

Elliot was offered some, but didn't want it.

All belly

Updates

We have a bookshelf next to Elliot’s crib, whose top is level with the top of his crib.   He wakes up early in the morning and grabs books off the shelf.  Usually in anger, he throws them down into the crib.  Later when he calms down he sits and reads to himself for a while.  

All of this happens at 4:30 or 5am, while we are ignoring his cries.  So how do I know that he reads these books and doesn’t just fling them around the crib?

Because sometimes I pluck a new book off the shelf to read to him.  I think I’m introducing him to something new.  But as we read I realize that he’s already read it.  He  knows what’s coming.  He’s anticipating stuff in a book that neither Hannah nor I have read him before. 

Now, I’ve done my best to prevent this dangerous independent reading practice.  A few weeks ago I taped aluminum foil over the window panes in his room.  (I got the idea from a common practice residents used to use in order to sleep during the day during night float rotations.  It works great: I would go to sleep in a pitch-dark room at 8am and woke up at 4pm fully rested.)

What else?  He’s getting quite rough and tumble.  It’s impossible to lie down in the grass now without  Elliot spotting it, smiling mischeviously, running toward you and throwing himself down onto your chest.  And I can get really rough with him, spin him around, flop him facedown onto the bed, and he just laughs and laughs.  

I realize now that I was extremely cautious with him when he was smaller (although that was probably appropriate.)  The more I play with him, the more I internalize how tough his body is, how flexible, and how much he loves being tossed around.  It gives me confidence to be more aggressive in playing with him, and we’re both happier for it. 

The Skype Sessions

We skype frequently with lots of folks from the family, but only Kate and Ed have mastered the art of taking screenshots.

So without ado, here are some of Kate and Ed's greatest photos taken from 1000 miles away:

More creepy spying on my kid

I couldn't resist.   We put him down for a nap, and he starts drinking his bottle of water and singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to himself.  

Watch to then end and you can see him get rid of the bottle and arrange his little blanket for sleep.  My little man is already learning how to take care of himself....

Language and its Baggage

When you sit down and try to see things through a two year old’s eyes, you start to realize how much work they have to do.  

Think about possession, for example.  It’s something we take for granted.  Mine, yours, hers.  We didn’t even have to learn it in school because by the time school started we already understood it. 

“That’s Scotty’s stroller” I said to Elliot today, as I held him back from pushing another kid’s Maclaren into the fountain by the Brooklyn Museum.  He resisted, and I repeated: “That’s not ours.  That’s Scotty’s.  We can’t touch it.”

And he paused.  He put a finger in his mouth and stared at the stroller.  His gaze went a thousand yards away.  He was either having a poop or a deep thought. 

I pondered what it (the deep thought) might be, and it occurred to me that “Possession” is something that takes a little getting used to.  It seems obvious to us, people own things, private property etc, but we didn’t pop out of the womb understanding this.  And it’s little moments like “Don’t shove Scotty’s stroller” that those lessons are taught and learned.

The moments may be small and fleeting, but the implications couldn’t be larger or more lasting.  Private property; capitalism; greed; sharing; selfishness; communalism; the acceptability of inequality in society.  All of these flow from that quick lesson about not touching someone else’s stuff.

Now imagine if it had been a banana sitting there instead of a stroller, and Elliot had missed lunch and was starving.  And what if I had forgotten my wallet and couldn’t buy him his own banana, despite a big pile of them sitting on the counter.  This is not such an implausible scenario.  Think about the lesson that sends about the importance of private property --- in particular, how the abstract notion of possession trumps concrete concerns such as hunger.

These are things he thinks about when he staring into the distance.  And this is why he has to sleep eleven hours a night and still nap during the day.  Because he’s doing Einstein-level brain work.  (This is not my idea.  Check this excellent TED talk by neuroscientist Alison Gopnik.  Money quote: “What’s it like to be a baby?  It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had 3 double espressos.”)

Updates: "MINE!" and bicycling

Elliot is saying "mine" all the time nowadays.  Except it comes out more like "MINE!" 

Hannah and I have been disagreeing on whether he fully understands the concept.  He seems to misuse the word often.  For example, we were all three in bed today, and he spied my bike helmet (which he loves to play with --- there's a nubbin on it that he pokes over and over while saying "button").

He pointed at the helmet, looked at me, and said "MINE!"

Hannah claims that he just likes to put his stamp of possession on everything.  Anything he likes he shouts mine at, as a way of establishing his right to touch it and play with it.

But Elliot doesn't have a way of saying "I want."  He probably knows what "I want" means, but he never says it to us.  So it seems to me that looking at something and shouting "MINE!" is his version of "I want".

(This is not such a massive disagreement, now that I think about it.)

What else?  We've finally started letting him watch the occasional smidge of TV.  He watches Blues Clues, we let him see one a day.  It's the one thing that can actually get him to sit quietly on the couch for ten uninterrupted minutes.

I rode him to and from daycare on my bike every day last week.  Yeah, it was pretty awesome.  He pointed at all the doggies, and leaned back to look up, through the leaves, to the sky, and smiled at me from below.


He whined a little every time we hit a big bump.  At first I thought he was just scared, but then I realized a few things: 1) there's no padding on his plastic seat. 2) he has no warning for when the bumps are about to hit. 3) even if he did get a warning, he can't stand up on the pedals like I do to absorb the shock.  So yeah, bumps suck for him.

Prescient?

I've never of Professor West going by Eddie....but if that's what it takes to sell shoes, so be it. 

What Elliot Has Taught Me Part IV

Last week I was walking to work, and three women and a baby passed me on the sidewalk.  

The toddler was almost exactly Elliot’s age, a pixie-cut beauty who held her arms out to the side as she walked.  The women were Manhattan Moms, dripping with Louis Vuitton and eating disorder. 

Used to be, I couldn’t read this situation.  Ten years ago --- or five years ago --- or, hell, 2.5 years ago --- I would have walked past without a glance. Ladies and babies, boring.  Moms, daughters, friends, aunts, who knows? 

But today was different.  Today I saw layers. 

The two year-old made a cooing sound as she toddled in front of the trio.  One of the ladies said “She’s so adorable.”  

So I instantly knew that was not the mom.  

Am I trying to say that the kid was not adorable?  Oh no.  That lady was right, the kid was adorable.  But a parent lets others compliment the kid.  One down.  

I glanced across the other two women.  Which was the mom?  

One was staring at her iPhone.  Unlikely behavior for the mom of a toddler on a narrow Manhattan sidewalk.  A toddler can veer into traffic in the time it takes to peruse 140 characters.

The other woman had her eyes lasered on that kid.  But that wasn’t what convinced me she was the mom.  It was the idiot grin spilled across her face.  She was gazing at that toddler with a dreamy, thousand-yard stare.  

I know that grin.  I’ve worn that grin.

And then they were gone.  How long does it take to zoom past someone walking the opposite direction on a sidewalk?  Seconds, right?  That’s the amount of time this interaction consumed.  

(By the way, in re: my previous post on assessing women’s childbirthing histories:  I’m pretty sure the one who said “She’s adorable” was childless.  I won’t go into details, but it had something to do with the tight-lipped, approval-seeking way she glanced over at the mom as she spoke the words.  Not sure about the uteral status of the one looking at her iPhone.)

Dandy in the Doorway, Pt II

Visit from Kate and Ed

We had a great time.  It wasn't captured on film, but they packed an inordinate number of books and dishes for us.  Thanks you two!  You've gone above and beyond already....

Permanent Marker

"The blog is running short on material"

Bike Ride

Well, we finally got around to getting a bike seat for Elliot.  Actually, Hannah got it for me as a present, and these photos were taken a few weeks back.   We took a long walk through the park and bought this helmet on the day we took these photos.

As you can see, I was super-pumped.

The remaining photographic evidences suggests that Elliot was less pumped.  But really he just had the sun in his eyes.

We did a quick loop around the block, just to get him used to it.   Leave him wanting more, I say.  The last thing I want to do is turn bike riding into a chore.

I really like this bike seat.  It's called an iBert, and while it's very nontraditional, it's become quite the rage here in Brooklyn.  I can feel my arms enfolding him when we ride, and somehow it feels like he's safer than he would be stuck behind me.

(FYI, there is sadly a lack of good evidence regarding which types of bike seats/trailers are safest.  As you can imagine, no one is doing randomized controlled trials of these things  (although now that I think of it, why not?  I would consider enrolling in such a study.))

Infants and Dementia

We had an interesting Grand Rounds today.  Someone gave a lecture on dementia, and one of the elements that stuck in my head was the way demented people get fixated.  They want to do one thing over and over --- like cook, or leave the house to visit a friend --- and it can be exhausting and frustrating to caregivers to repeatedly deny the demented person this wish.

So the Alzheimer's Association designed these nylon covers that obscure the object of desire.  They make the stove look like a fridge, the door look like a window.  And without the visual stimulus, the demented patient no longer wants to cook, or leave the house.

So of course I immediately thought of Elliot.

I'm not the first person to draw to connection between dementia and infancy.  But it's especially striking now that I see both of them on a regular basis.   Those repetitive behaviors and requests are so similar in both groups.  And simply removing the object takes away the desire.

For Elliot, it's often "Dumpty", the computer game featuring Humpty Dumpty that we got him so that he could bang on the laptop with impunity.  He's fallen in love with it, and whenever he sees the silver top of Hannah's laptop he starts calling out "Dumpty!"

So I guess all that's left is to design a nylon cover that makes a laptop look like something else.  And then sit back and become a millionaire.

Thanks Namma!

Kate and Ed are in town, helping us get packed up.  Elliot saw them on Wednesday, and today he woke up saying "namma" over and over.  Like 30 times before I left for work.  Seriously, it got a little much.

Luckily, namma was on her way.

Another Trip to the Park

We do tend to make these trips frequently in the summer.

Emily and Jesse brought a cool spinning kite that Elliot was fascinated by.

We never quite got it in the air, but good times were had by all.  Except for the girl who got hit in the head with it as I ran at full speed across Long Meadow.  But she handled it quite gracefully.

Baby Dance Party!

This happened spontaneously at a recent get-together.  Suddenly all the babies were in one room, music was playing, and everyone was spinning in circles. 

Except you'll note the one little orange-shirted boy sitting still in the corner.   Watch and learn, Elliot. 

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?