As you may or may not know, the walk signs in New York City are colored orange and white. 

The Don’t Walk signal is an orange hand.  The Walk signal is a white figure walking.

The unfortunate upshot of this is that when it’s time to cross the street, I say to Elliot, in my cheeriest voice, “Okay, let’s go!  The white man says we can walk!”

At Thanksgiving

Obama

Elliot's bedtime noises

I realize I haven't posted much video of Elliot talking.  I just got our camera up and running again, so hopefully you'll be hearing it soon.  Consider this a warm-up.  For those willing to listen all the way to the end, he's got a pretty good vocabulary:

Prospect Park Pond

Happy Thanksgiving!

Doctor check-up

We went to the doctor recently.  She’s our favorite!  An orthodox Jew who practices in Park Slope, she is no-nonsense but still fun.  Kind of like I imagine Nancy Pelosi would be if she were your doctor. 

Anyway, everything went fine.  Elliot started out quiet --- he’d seen her 6 months earlier and was trying to place her face.  By the end he had warmed up a lot, was smiling at her and saying a few words here and there.  

As she departed, Dr. K said “Bye-bye.  Can you say bye, bubby?”  

And Elliot said, clear as day, “Bye Bubby.”

Trick-or-Treating

A bedtime

We went down and had a halloween candy, and I let him watch a Blues Clues.  Then we came upstairs and changed into a fresh diaper and PJs, and I said, “Okay, let’s go get a baba and go to sleep.”

And he freaked out.  Just lost it.  Started crying, sobbing, wrecked.  Standing there in his little footies in the middle of the living room.

“What’s wrong?  It’s bedtime.”  He couldn’t reply.  He was adrift.  What was this?

He stared up at me, unable to formulate.  Then he pointed at the grownup bed.  “Snuggle,” he said. 

“You want to snuggle?”

He nodded emphatically. 

“Okay, we’ll go down and get a baba, and then come back and snuggle for a few minutes before bed.”

While we were downstairs at the sink, I said “Do you want to read a book while we snuggle?”

“No.”

“No book?  Just snuggle?”

“Just snuggle.”

So that’s what we did.  Snuggling means lying next to each other in bed under the covers. I plopped him down and lay next to him, and for a few moments we stared at the ceiling silently, listening to the sound of milk burbling through the rubber nipple.  

“Dada.”

“Yes?”  I looked over at him. 

He waved his impossibly adorable hand at me. “Hi dada.”

“Hi Elliot.”

We listened to the sound of the milk for a bit longer.  “Milk,” he explained. 

“Yes.”

He pointed at the ceiling.  “Light bulb.  Light bulb.  Light bulb.” 

“Yeah, there are light bulbs in all those sockets.”  He nodded seriously. 

“Okay, time for bed.  Are you ready?”

“No.”  But he let me lift him without protest, and kissed me as I put him down in his crib. 

I don’t know why he wanted to do this.  He’s never asked for it before.  But it meant a lot to me, far more than I might have expected. 

Why is it so touching to me that my son would want to hang out for a few minutes before bed?  I don’t know.  

But that’s parenthood I guess: you can’t explain it to someone who hasn’t experienced it. 

Elliot is Cool

Or at least he wears cool clothes sometimes...

While eating my morning muffin

God, I get so desperate for a little Elliot-time after a long day of work.  It's been brutal at the hospital recently, leaving for work at 6am and getting home after 7:30.  And to walk in the door and see Elliot pretty much ready for bed is heartbreaking.  I run over and hug him and read books to him, and I want to play with him and tickle him and grab him by his little legs and wrestle with him all at once, all in the fifteen minutes I have before he goes to sleep.

What's so mind-blowing about this hunger to spend time with him is the change from when I spend all day with him.  When Hannah went to Oregon for the weekend it was tough to spend the whole day with him --- not just keeping him from killing himself, that part has become second nature.  It's the emotional demands he takes on you.  He constantly wants you to give of yourself, to play with him, to jump with him, to explore with him, to be curious with him.  He knows when you are faking it, and he will not tolerate it.  You can't phone it in, if you're playing legos with him you have to REALLY get excited about the legos or he'll just move on to something else.

And the fact that you can't fake it makes caring for him exhausting.  An 8-hour day alone with him in incredibly draining.

But I'd much rather have 8 hours than the 15 minutes I got yesterday.  And that I will probably get today...

Red Hook Farm

We have some friends who live in Red Hook, so the weekend after the storm Elliot and I headed over there to see if we could lend a hand (Hannah was off being a good friend to Liz in Oregon).

 It turned out that our friends were already taken care of, so we wandered over to the Red Hook Community Farm, which is a MASSIVE plot of land, like two football fields.

A big chunk of it is asphalt.

And it's right next to Ikea. 

Elliot tried to contribute, with his art.

And his general adorableness.

Just stuff

Not interesting stuff.  Just stuff. 

1) Someone screwed him up with shapes.  He's been (for months now --- in fact maybe I already blogged about this?) pointing a circles and saying "oval."  I have to gently correct him.  And he doesn't take it well. 

I'm blaming someone at Bumblebee Daycare, because when he was at Sunflower he was between 6 months and 10 months, and that just seems too young.  

Regardless of who is responsible, it's been an intensive, brutal, punishing corrective process.  But slowly those monsters' grip is loosening, the toxins are leaching, and our lovely child is returning to us. I've missed him so!

2) He skips 5.  We've been doing a lot of counting, and somewhere along the line Elliot decided to go straight from 4 (as in 1...2...3...4)  to 9.  

It's not that he doesn't know 5 comes after 4.  If you stop him and say "No, what's after 4?" he will think about it and say 5. 

What's happening, I think is that he has learned that ten is the goal.  And what better way to get to ten than skipping to 9?

When he actually does this skipping thing, it makes perfect sense to me.  We're reading a counting book, and we start counting pears or something.  He starts slowly (1...2...) but quickly accelerates (3, 4) and somewhere around the number 3 I can hear the excitement enter his voice.  By four he's fired up, brimming with anticipation, and the next number out of his mouth? Nine.  

If I were a better writer I could find some way that all of us adults do something exactly like this in our adulty lives.  But the analogy, if it exists, refuses to come to me right now.

If you think of one, leave it in the comments. 

Storms

It's been a crazy few weeks.  Hurricane Sandy had barely moved through before we got word of another storm shaping up.  The NYC marathon was canceled.

On Tuesday Obama won reelection (Yay!) (Elliot can now recognize photos of Obama, and he shouts "Obama" (which is a perfect word for an infant to pronounce) whenever he sees him).

Then yesterday this second storm hit us, a Nor'easter they called it.  I was trying to finish my compost bin and the wind was getting really strong, and then it started raining.  Hannah and I pulled the compost bin down into the basement, and an hour later when I came upstairs it was snowing.

Not the nice calm Christmasy snow, big flakes drifting onto your parka and such.  This was blustery swirls of ice pellets stabbing you in the cheekbone.  Not fun.  It took me half an hour to drive 10 blocks to pick up Elliot.  And I was wet from the 15-second run from the house to the car.

This is our backyard a day later, and it's been pretty warm so some of the snow melted:

That's our compost pile, which will soon be binned...

Elliot is smart

Can I just do that thing where I talk about how smart my kid is?  Do you mind?  Great.  Thanks for pretending you don’t find this incredibly irritating. 

We were reading a halloween themed book, and he pointed at a spooky castle and said “House.”  I explained to him that it was called a castle, which was like a house but a lot bigger.  I left it at that --- an explanation of the feudal system of governance seemed like it would be beyond both him and me.  

We finished the book and started another.  This was a train book, and on one page the train wound its way through a city.  

Elliot pointed at the skyscrapers.  “Castle,” he said.  

“Oh!  RIght, well, actually --- Yes, that is a really big house, but it’s different than a castle.”  

He looked at me suspiciously.  I realized I would have to be more specific.  

“It doesn’t have turrets.  A castle has turrets, and little spires and cupolas.”

He was skeptical. Should I be learning from this guy?  I plowed on.

“Also castles are made out of stone, and buildings are steel or wood.  Or, well, I guess buildings can be from stone too.  But castles are always really old.  Unless you built a new one, which almost no one does.”

He stared at me.  There was a pause. 

“Read Lowly Worm!”

Birthday at the Daycare

Birthday trip to the Zoo

Elliot updates

1) "Up Daddy.  Up Mommy."   These expressions are used constantly.  We'll be sitting eating dinner and we shall be commanded by Himself to rise.  We ask him why, but Himself just repeats the inviolate command.

(Yeah, I'm poking fun, but who has the last laugh? Himself.  Because after five or six rounds of unshakeable Up Daddy, what always happens?  I get up and see what he wants me to do.)

2)  Hannah.  He's started using her name.  We don't know how he figured it out, but I guess it's not that tricky.  There's something so hilarious about hearing him babble "Hah-nah, hah-nah," over and over (as he inevitably does, because once he sees how the words make us laugh, he keeps repeating them).

3) Couches are fun right now.  We went over to Brady's place for Baconfest 2012, and Elliot was drawn immediately to the couch.  He's the size that he can run up and smash his chest and belly against the front of it, and then flop face down onto the couch seat, with his feet still on the ground.  Then he likes to roll over on his back, again with the feet on the ground, which puts him in a very weird, uncomfortable- and unhealthy-seeming position.  Often it exposes his stark white tummy too --- which is hard to resist tickling.

Hurricane Sandy

We are all well.  There are some tales to tell, but none involving getting soaked or hit with a branch or made homeless.

Here's a video I took on Monday night, at the height of the storm:

At the time, the decision to go outside seemed pretty innocuous.  But after reading this article about a young couple killed during  the hurricane, I feel the need to give thanks.  That couple lived just a mile from us, and they were only outside for a few minutes to walk to the dog.  It's easy to forget how quickly it can all be snatched away from you.... (more about the tragedy here)

Head over to Nostrand South for a more complete story (and photos) of my hurricane experience.