Monthly Archives: July 2010

Words

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I’m reading , at last, having bought it as a birthday present to myself. (It’s not in the library yet, and they’re discussing it chapter by chapter at Ask Moxie , and it’s been on my wishlist for ages, and it was reduced, and so on.) I skipped ahead to the chapter on speech development yesterday, because I’m sure that Mabel’s precocious verbalization will be commented on while we’re away, and I wanted to know what I’m talking about in response.

Call me over-reactive, but somehow, while I’m proud as anything of her speedy speech, something inside me takes any comment on it as an unspoken criticism of Monkey’s more unhurried development in this area way back when he was this age. Which clearly is ridiculous, as if anyone knows or remembers or cares, since he’s chatterboxapaloozaville these days and has been for quite a while, but hey, I’m their mother. Love one, you’d better be damn sure you love them both.

Anyway, I wondered if the book would turn up any clues as to why my kids have developed so differently speechwise. They were both active babies, both early crawlers, both bad sleepers (were? what’s this past tense, paleface?) – but as I may have mentioned, here she is on the cusp of 21 months and talking in sentences, whereas at the same age he was just about to have his long-awaited vocabulary explosion and go from 5 words to 50 in a week or two. Which was perfectly normal for his age – it’s not that he was slow, though I felt as if he was as I watched other kid after other kid come out with two or three or five words at a time. Anyway, why the disparity? Did we do something differently? What could the much-lauded experts tell me?

Well, the book says (to quote my mother, who was ususally talking about Dr Spock) that to help a baby learn to speak, you must not only speak to them but also react favourably to their speech-like vocalizations when they babble back to you. So if you touch or kiss or respond to your four-month-old when she makes a voiced vowel sound, rather than just a cry or a yelp or a bleat or whatever other sounds babies make, you’re showing her that this is the path to take. As they get older, babies learn words better if they hear more than one person repeat them, and with object motion to help them connect the word with the thing they’re looking at. So you wave a ball in front of your 11-month-old’s face and say “ball” in a sing-song voice, and then get a couple of other people to do it, and hey presto, they learn and repeat the word “ball”.

Mabel consults the book

As the second child, Mabel’s experience was obviously different from Monkey’s, since she had him right there in her face from day one, yammering on about Spider-Man or asking for apple juice or whatever he happened to be saying. But I can’t believe we responded any more or differently to her than we did to him at an early age.

So I realised that it’s simply down to their personalities. As I said, they were both active and crawled early, but Monkey walked at 14 months and Mabel at 10 and a half. He’s a cautious kid, for all his crazy antics – whereas she’s just crazy and anticky. It’s not just her reckless, unscientific youth that makes her walk straight into the pool without stopping to wonder where this water might be going as it rises to her neck and above; or climb to the top of the highest swirly slide and come straight down, hair buzzing with static, mouth wide with laughter – she’s that sort of person. And when it comes to talking, she just goes for it and says the word.

Monkey’s receptive language was all there from an early age, and just as he was such a great crawler that he saw no need to walk, he was also such a good communicator – what with the pointing and the nodding and the shaking of the head – that he got all he wanted for a long time without needing to put words to it. He talked when he was good and ready, and that’s how he is. He’ll read, and swim, and ride a bike and all those other things, when he’s good and ready and sure he’s up for it too, and not on anyone else’s schedule.

Thoughts on a storm

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Let’s go out on the deck and blow bubbles!
Yay bubbles!
Ooh, those are some dark clouds way over there behind the trees.
And that’s a lot of wind all of a sudden.
And maybe we should just go inside now before the storm starts.
Yep, here it comes.
Wow.
Woah.
Eep. I didn’t know those trees were that bendy.
Let’s just go down to the basement in case there’s a tornado* or something.
Oop, there go the lights. Let’s not stay in the basement. I don’t think the baby finds it fun down here in the dark.
Maybe we’ll just sit here on the stairs away from the windows.
I think it’s going over.
Yup, that’s it.
What a lot of branches there are on the lawn all of a sudden.

…

Let’s go out to dinner.

…

Hmm. Still no electricity. What a fun adventure.
Isn’t it funny how it’s cooler and brighter outside the house than inside?
Even though the temperature has dropped from 100 F since the storm. To, ooh, 95 or so.

…

Well, we can’t see any more so we may as well go to bed.
Monkey, why are you still awake? You don’t like the dark? You need me to lie down with you for a while?
You’re a million degrees and you insist on keeping your duvet on you and you want to cuddle up to me. I cannot do this. Get your leg off me.
What do you mean, “You just have to live with it”?
You need to pee? Great. Let’s go to the bathroom. Use your flashlight.
[Cries from offstage]
Okay, now she’s awake so I have to go. Sorry.
Go to sleep, baby. I know you’re hot. We’re all hot.
[Noise of Monkey's flashlight clattering to the tiled floor of the bathroom and sending batteries scattering. I wonder whether he managed to pee first or not.]
Come on, baby, we have to call in the troops.
[I take miserably hot and tired baby to husband's bedside, where husband is pretending to be asleep.]
You need to help Monkey pee.
[I leave with baby.]
Go to sleep, baby.

…

Maybe it’s cooler here on the nice wooden floor. Aaah. Nice wooden floor.
Hard wooden floor. Maybe the bed’s not so bad.

…

How come you’re asleep? It’s too hot to sleep. I can’t sleep.
[I toss.]
[I turn.]
[I write blog posts in my head, compose packing lists for upcoming trip, think about shoes, and muse on names** for the third baby we're not having.]
[Baby wakes up.]
Go to sleep, baby.

…

Aaand now it’s time to get up. Look, still no electricity. How exciting this is.
Let’s go out for breakfast and Internet access.

*We live in Maryland. Tornadoes, while not unheard of, are pretty rare. It’s not Kansas out there, Toto.

** There are no more names. We’ve used them all. No more babies, then.

This entry was posted in New house , sleep and tagged internal monologue on by .

Famming goos

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Mabel talks in sentences of six or seven words now, and conjugates and uses pronouns and all sorts. This morning she said, “Maybe Daddy took it.” She used the word “earlier” correctly last weekend, and will answer “because” when you ask why. (She’s not so clear on what comes after because.)

At the crack of dawn the other morning she could hear B and Monkey downstairs and got up to join them, leaving me metaphorically in the dust. (Or for dead, whichever.) I rolled over and buried my head a little deeper in the pillow, as she cheerily announced, “Bye, Mummy … have fun.”

We don’t have a huge number of (non Disney or Pixar) kid DVDs, but somehow we acquired two of the nauseating songs and animals and children dressed in “fashions” from the early 90s (why does that not sound as long ago as it is?) type baby DVDs, and I grudgingly have to admit that someone must have really done their research, because it seems babies really like them. Mabel has discovered the Baby Animals one, and the other day was transfixed by the baby flamingoes section. Why flamingoes? I don’t know – personally I find the baby lion cubs a lot cuter, but she has suddenly started to demand the “Famming goos” at all hours. When we’re sick of the DVD we bring out the big word book, which contains a picture of a famming goo, but after that she’s on her own.

Wait till I put on Potty Power for her. I shudder in anticipation.

What was my point again?

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Where did I go? Two small sleeping bodies, independently alive, out of nothing. (Not nothing. An embrace, an intention, a hope, a love. Of course. But still, what atoms?)

Monkey keeps confusing “country” with other words – he asked me the other day, “Why does our universe not have a king?” (He had been surprised and delighted to find out that kings and princes existed, and still exist, in real life. I had to dig up photos of Juan Carlos and Elizabeth II on the computer, and then I told him about revolutions and guillotines. I was pretty sure that he’s the sort of four-year-old boy who would enjoy such things. Also, I was trying to distract him from actuality with history.) I don’t quite know why that’s relevant.

But I? I’m only just coming back from it. Having a baby is a nine-months-and-two-years tunnel for me and I’ve been inside for most of the past five years. It’s simple and comforting to be so single-minded, consumed with just the well-being of the small being, looking out for yourself only in the most basic of terms: if I don’t eat, I may faint; if I get sick, getting up in the middle of the night will be harder; things like that.

It’s not so much where the rest of me is as when . When do I get a chance to just be, without demands or a countdown to the moment I’m called on again? A thing as simple as being alone is so rare these days that the mere act of going shopping without my two small decoys – they draw the eye, you know – makes me feel almost invisible. Remember how it felt when you were 14 and you were convinced that if you wore anything other than blue jeans and a sloppy sweater, everyone would look at you, would point and laugh, would remark on how that girl is wearing a skirt, or a red top, or whatever it was? You felt the eyes of the world on you, and nothing your mother said about how nobody else would really care could convince you otherwise? Well, this is the same in reverse. I’m sure nobody notices me on my own, because the only reason they notice me the rest of the time is because the kids are so darn cute. (Or so badly behaved, take your pick.) Without them, I can dart and weave through the aisles like a wraith: unencumbered, silent, free to think my own thoughts without interruption and without having to constantly plan a strategy to get everyone on board for the simple movement from a to b.

I don’t mean invisible in a sad, scurrying, self-effacing-mouse-like way, mind you. It’s more about freedom – I can put my head down and get things done, or I can swing my arms and strut and pretend I’m 24 again, because it’s not as if I feel like a middle-aged houselady (to quote Kristin , who is the least middle-aged houselady possible and yet continues to call herself one). I had a facial last week, and when the nice beautician asked me how old I was – presumably in order to know whether the size of my pores was shockingly bad or shockingly good – I faltered in the middle of my answer and thought “Thirty-seven? Thirty -seven? No, there’s something wrong about that. Surely I’m twenty-seven. No?” Maybe it was because I was lying down under a sheet partially disrobed, which is always a good way to feel insecure, but the decade just sounded all wrong to my ears.

But mostly, I find that getting older is less about feeling insecure and more about being confident in my own choices. I like that about it, if nothing else.

Honey milk

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“Honey milk. I want honey milk.”
“You want honey milk what?”
“Now?”
Sigh.
“What’s the magic word?”
“Abracadabra?”
“…”
“Please can I have some honey milk?”
“That’s so much nicer. I will make you some honey milk.”

The funny thing is, I thought I had invented honey milk, to placate the boy with something sweet and warm and milky that didn’t emanate directly from me. It’s not something I remember from my childhood, like mashed bananas, or French toast, or a big bowl of Bird’s custard. Then I heard that my sister-in-law makes it for my nephews too. I suppose it’s pretty obvious, but I wondered if it was some sort of biological knowledge all mothers carry deep in our genes.

We just had friends staying with us. Their son is two months younger than Monkey, and the boys spent the time beating each other up, chasing each other maniacally around the house and over the sofa, wailing for justice because one or other had inflicted a completely unexpected injury, or sitting quietly side by side on the sofa, mesmerised by the swift and judicious application of a Batman DVD by exasperated parents. It was a little tiring. I love having guests, but much like Douglas Adams – who loved to hear the whoosh of deadlines as they went past – I also love the restoration of silence and order when they leave, even though we still have two perfectly noisy and messy children of our own. There’s nothing like some variety to make you appreciate the normal.

Almost a week ago, in a fit of productiveness, I strode purposefully towards a shelf to tidy something and smashed my toe forcefully into a chair leg on the way. As I hopped around gasping in agony and trying (as I do sometimes at moments like this) to gauge how much like or unlike the pain of labour and childbirth it was, I cast around in vain for someone else to blame. My children, for callously watching TV as I writhed? My husband for misaligning the chair leg? (It wasn’t misaligned.) Sadly, only myself, for not paying attention and/or wearing shoes. But I never wear shoes in the house – I’ve never broken a toe before. It’s not actually broken – Dr Google convinced me that it would be purple all over instead of just one place if that were the case, and I wouldn’t be able to walk at all. It’s improving slowly, but I’ve been limping, more or less depending on the recent-ness of follow-up injuries like Monkey jumping on my bare foot in his sandals, or bumping the same toe into the table leg as I stood up (will I never learn? no, apparently) ever since.

My little toes are ridiculous bumps of things, mere carbuncles on the rest of my peculiar little short, wide, high-arched, stumpy-toed feet, with no visible joints to them, just a curve leading leading to the tiniest toenail you’ve ever seen. On the rare occassions that I go for a pedicure, I always expect the girl to burst out laughing and ask me if I seriously expect her to put polish on that tiny expanse. Possibly she tells all her friends in Korean and all the other salon girls are surreptitiously mocking my tiny pinkie toes as they pass. But they’re polite enough not to say anything directly to me, for which I must be grateful.

So here I am, languishing with my bruised foot up, guests gone, house a disaster – but I have no impetus left to clean it, so it can stay that way for a while – Monkey sporting his new, improved (because it actually fits him this time) Spider-Man costume. I like to think that he’s less obsessive about it than he would have been if he’d got it, say, this time last year, which was probably about when he started to want one. I can actually get him out of the house in regular clothes still, which is a plus, even if he did leave the swimming-pool changing rooms all Spidey’d up the other day. He now wants us to make him red gloves out of cardboard, no matter how often we explain that cardboard just doesn’t sew. He’s not a child to take no for an answer; he just asks again. And again. And again, while I’m making dinner. And again, at bedtime. And again, first thing in the morning.

I have no idea where he gets such optimism from.

This entry was posted in eating and tagged Monkey , Spider-Man , superheroes , visitors on by .

Weaning. Or not.

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Let me quote myself , a couple of months ago: “[...]gradually one can cut down on the nursing, start saying no when a mealtime is coming up, make sure they’re reasonably hungry for lunch and dinner, nurse afterwards, whatever.” What a pile of shite. Codswallop. Baloney. This does not work. Maybe it does for you, but not for me.

What happens is this: Mabel comes home from an outing with her father. She runs in the door, delighted to see me. I pick her up. She takes my face in both hands, orientates my eyes to hers, and whispers in the most incredibly cute manner: “I need mumeet.”

“Do you?” I say, simultaneously exasperated and delighted.
“Yes. Do you,” she agrees.
“How about some food?” I ask.
“No. No food. Mumeet.”
“Applesauce? A delicious yogurt? Some nice cold milk from the fridge? Dinner?” I hazard.
“No dinner. I need mumeet.”

And that’s that. I know that if I take her into the kitchen her feet will evade the pinion of the high chair; if I attempt to put her down and open the fridge, she’ll cling and wail piteously; if I am so bold as to try to put some food in front of her it will be batted away by an increasingly intolerant hand. I have made my point, woman. You know my demands, and they will be met.

And they will, because I’m a pushover. Later, she might have some food. She might even eat broccoli and sausages, or roast chicken, or a scrambled egg and baked beans, warming the cockles of her mother’s heart; or she might go to bed having had nothing solid all day but half a frozen waffle and too many raisins. I’m constantly making excuses – she has a cold, that last canine is still coming through, it’s hot – and I’m happy that I can nourish her so well.

But heck. In much the same way as my blood is delicious to mosquitoes, my breastmilk must be pure ambrosia, nectar of the gods, more scrummy than any food known to man or (more pertinently) baby. I really wanted to just gradually tail off with the nursing (both times), but it always seems to go the other way around, as they gradually pare down their accepted foods and come to pester me for the good stuff ever more often. My plan (hah. plan.) now is to wait till September when things are more orderly, schedule us heavily with classes and Things to Do and whatnot, have proper meals at proper hours all in place, and then just keep whizzing her about all day so she doesn’t have time to stop and ask for mumeet.

This sort of worked before, with Monkey, and there were only about two weeks of my having to deny, deny, deny, and distract, and ignore the wailing and rending of garments, before he got used to only getting side three times a day. (Which is still almost a full complement, I’ll have you know. A baby only needs four sessions a day to be considered fully fed.) Since Mabel doesn’t nurse to sleep at naptime, usually, we might even cut down to twice a day quite quickly. But oh boy will she be attached to those two times, and look to them as a lifeline and her birthright and her God-given due. (Or maybe I’m projecting.) The weaning technique of “never offer, never refuse” just isn’t something that works in this house. I hardly ever do offer, but I have to be more proactive in the refusal department, and that’s what gets me every time.

Taste memories

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I’ve decided that “Miss” is too boring a pseudonym for the small, blonde, talking-in-sentences firecracker who bounces around our house demanding that you read her books or find her shoes. Henceforth, she will be Mabel. That’s Miss Mabel to you.

I watched her put a hot pebble to her mouth on Monday, as we played in a friend’s yard, in a friend’s paddling pool. Instead of shouting (pointlessly), “No, yucky! Don’t eat it!” I stopped a moment and thought about how stones taste. So often in an Irish summer (that elusive creature) I would have picked up a stone on Killiney Beach or Whiterock – a stone warm from the brief sun and smoothly round from years of rolling in and out on the shelving shingle, shiny bright black or matte grey with a band of white running through the middle – and brought it to my lips to taste the salt and the hardness and the nothing that stones taste of. Maybe we should all lick a (nice clean) stone now and then and remember how it feels not to be paranoid about every little thing.

I also have a clear memory of how the strap on my pushchair (that’s stroller to you, maybe) tasted – a memory that had been submerged until I caught Mabel sucking on something similar one day recently. I was a thumb sucker and my kids aren’t, but I think I must have swapped out the thumb for a strap at some point, because I can vividly recall how it felt to suck my saliva back and forth through the vinyl-y webbing of the strap, and how good it tasted to my two-year-old self.

It’s funny that non-food taste memories are more vivid than edible ones. But then, I was something of a picky eater myself as a child. I blame my mother’s bad cooking, but that’s probably not all there was to it. I can remember the day I first decided that I liked peas, so I was probably six or seven before that happened – and they were definitely an early vegetable. It’s possible that I existed on rice krispies and chocolate Yoplaits (in the waxy cardboard cup, remember?) and mashed bananas for many years before I became the champion all-round eater you see before you today.

Secularism

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We drive by the local Catholic church at least once most days on our way from our new house to wherever we happen to be going. Sometimes it’s a Sunday, and I’m sorry, in many ways, that we’re not taking our children into the cool, dark, peaceful embrace of familiarity that I would feel on entering the building. I loved the ritual of Mass, the soothing tones of the muttered responses, the chords of the organ and the warbling of our local choir of old ladies, the space to think or not think for a while, and especially the knowledge that wherever I was, I had a community to automatically belong to. Mass on Sunday, or Saturday evening, put a shape on my week for 29 years.

It seems mean to deny our children all that. (Plus the opportunity of a private education at discounted prices.) There’s just the tiny problem that we’re both pretty much athiests at this point, and, call me picky but it would seem hypocritical. I think if either B or I had strong feelings about God or raising our children in a religion, the other would quite happily go along with it rather than take a stand for heathenism, but somehow we both fell off the God wagon within a few years of each other and by the time Monkey was born the only decision was how to tell the grandparents that there wasn’t going to be a Christening.

I distinctly recall wondering at some point in my childhood whether all this Mass and Jesus stuff was a hoax dreamed up by the adults to keep us quiet. (It may have been shortly after I’d been disillusioned about Santa Claus, which would mean I was 8 or 9, perhaps.) I thought it would be an awful lot of trouble to go to, and didn’t seriously consider it, but it’s interesting that it crossed my mind. And then, when I turned 30, I somehow went from being a card-carrying Catholic who firmly believed that children should have some sort of framework for belief rather than nothing at all, even if it was Catholicism with all its many potholes, to a sort of atheistic agnostic who felt that God was obviously a construct of man rather than vice versa.

Which leaves us in a bit of a vaccuum when it comes to some parts of childrearing. I want my children to respect the beliefs of others, of course; to have a strong moral compass and don’t need to wonder what’s right or wrong; to understand the meaning of God and religion and have a basic knowledge of their cultural heritage, including what Christians and Catholics believe. I want them to feel free to make their own choices without fear of ridicule or censure; but we do still have a responsibility to instill our values in them – assuming we value our values. Do I value atheism? Not really – if my kids want to believe in God, I hope I’ll be happy for them. But if they want to join a militant right-wing evangelical church or protest against gay marriage or picket abortion clinics, I do think I’ll be telling them how I feel in no uncertain terms. I should hope I won’t have to tell them because they’ll already know.

Last summer Monkey started asking about death, and God, and religion, and we had some good discussions (monologues, more like), but I think he’s forgotten quite a lot of it at this point. I have to remind myself that these, just like the talks about where babies come from, are things we need to be talking about frequently, not just once upon a time. Sometimes I’m trying so hard to be politically correct and not offend anyone, that I forget it’s my job to teach my children right from wrong and good from bad – if I try too hard not to criticize the man in the truck for smoking, they won’t ever know that smoking is something I don’t want them to do.

At the moment, Monkey mostly thinks churches are just big buildings for demonstrating how strong a superhero he is when he describes to me how he can lift them up. Maybe a field trip is in order.