Summer in the BK Botanical Garden

Homeowners!

Well, we did it.  Signed all the papers, now we own a house.  I'm not going to muddle too much of this blog with the details --- you can find all of that at the website I mentioned in yesterday's post.  Like I said, once I get all the recent vacation photos online I may take a slight blogging break....

Big Changes. Massive.

Well, if reading this blog is your only source of information about our lives, you're missing out on a lot.

I know.  You're crushed.

But let's throw a non-Elliot-related update on the insanity of our lives onto the blog here:

We've been trying to buy a house since February.  Well, actually a lot longer than that, but in February our offer was accepted.  We figured hey, the process is sure to be done by August.  But no. We had to move out of our apartment on July 31 and still had not closed on the house.

But we were heading to Marie's memorial service on Wednesday, July 25th.  Which meant moving out of our apartment the weekend prior, July 21.  We put all our stuff into storage (more details on that never), and then went and stayed with our friends Anne and Tim for three days in Queens.

Have I lost you yet? Keep reading.

When we got back from Tahoe on August 5 we had no place to stay.  Luckily we had arranged for a month-long sublet before leaving.  We took a cab directly from the airport to this sublet which we'd never slept in before (with, before I forget, a quick stop-off in Queens to pick up Elliot's crib) and were terrified of losing the keys to.

Now I'm confident I've lost you.

But all that is in the past.  Two days in the past.  Tomorrow we close on our house (knock wood! fingers crossed!) and then all my free time will go into the house.

I guess this is my way of saying that posts to this blog may slow down a bit.

FWIW, I started a blog about our new (knock wood! fingers crossed!) house, which I'm calling Nostrand South.

But I have lots of photos and videos from our 10-day trip to Tahoe, so I'll toss up a few of those as regularly as I can.   Here's a good one, courtesy of Hannah:

Words Have Meanings

Well, it’s been a great vacation. As evidenced by my lack of blogging.  

But photos were taken, and we will find a way to get them online soon. 

Until then:  For the past few weeks he’s been saying “outside” a lot more.   Whenever he wants to go outside, he says it.  So he’s using it correctly.  But yesterday we were on the porch at the Tahoe cabin, and he pointed at the glass door and said “outside”. 

“No, silly, we already are outside.” 

He paused.  “Outside,” he said again, pointing.

“You mean inside?  You want to go inside?”

He paused  and gave me a quizzical look.  Then he nodded yes (another of his favorite motions). 

I realized that although Elliot had been using the word outside correctly so far, he actually didn’t understand what it meant.  He was using it to mean “let’s transition from indoors to outdoors.” 

I assumed that Elliot understood that the word outside referred to the world outside our house. But in his mind, outside referred to the transition between inside and outside.  So when he wanted to go back inside (i.e. transition) the logical word to use was “outside”. 

Marie Ferguson Memorial

We are on vacation.  Many of you already know this, but I thought I would make it clear to all.  We left last Wednesday for Alameda, and spent a few days with Pat and Tim and Jeni and Desiree and Dylan and Lexi and Chloe.  (Note to self reading this 20 years from now: you have not forgotten any relatives, Lexi and Chloe are dogs).

Friday we drove to Lake Tahoe, and today is the small memorial service for Marie.  It should be a lovely, warm event, a nice way to remember an amazing woman.  I don't have my own laptop right now or I would post a few photos of her.  The only one I can find right now is this shot from our beach picnic last summer:

 

Visit to the Brooklyn Museum (ext.)

This is from a few weeks back.  The Brooklyn museum and its strangely hypnotic water fountain are a few blocks from our apartment.

This is to keep you busy until I manage to get my Alameda and Tahoe photos online...

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.