isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Clicking on a photo will start a slide show of month 6 pictures

Dear Adam,
We are halfway to your first birthday already. We can hardly believe it. I suppose our belief is strained daily, though, so I should be careful about how I throw that around. Anyway, today you are six months old. The time goes by so quickly, but each day we see you changing.

This sixth month has been a significant one, particularly in terms of your locomotion. Just last week you finally mastered the art of rolling over. You can do it at will, unless you are blocked by a sofa cushion or an interceding monkey, for example, in which case you jerk back and forth like a robotic beetle, not quite managing to complete the roll. Now that you CAN roll over you DO roll over, and over and over. It is only a matter of time before you roll yourself right off the sofa, or the changing station, in the eyeblink of a turned back. We are ever vigilant, but it’s bound to happen. You can do it so fast, like a shark taking a bite out of its own tail. You do it reflexively whenever we put you down on your back. Except when we really want you to. This makes changing your diaper or dressing you a bit more of a challenge than previously. You do it in your sleep, or get halfway there. This results in improbable sleeping postures that resemble frozen basketball lay-ups.

Adam drives it to the hoop

Right on the heels of this roll-over project is the concept of crawling. You’ve shown comprehension of this for quite some time, but now that you can reliably get yourself from supine to prone, you are really ramping up the efforts toward self-moving in another plane. You see that red block with the animals on it. It is taunting you from half a meter, and you will be damned if you will let it get away with it. You hurk your little hips up and the movement cascades through your body like an inchworm, and somehow your body creaks forward two centimeters. At this rate of travel you will not get to that block before bath-time, but it’s the theory that’s important. It’s theoretically possible for you to crawl, and you are already acting upon that theory. Imagine how much this chills us to the very marrow of our bones: I imagine Truman’s reaction when the Soviets set off Joe-1. I was there when you executed your first flawless roll-over. I watched the single beat it took before you hurked your hips up inchworm-fashion, and I looked right into your mother’s face when she locked eyes with me and said, “oh honey, we are screwed.”

On the topic of being there, I have been enjoying my baby-duties very much, limited as they are compared with your mother’s. Your personality has been developing during this month, and we have decided that we like you. You are fun to be around. You enjoy the little games we play, even the ones that involve kissing you frenetically around your little neck/shoulder interface, the one that makes you laugh out-of-control. We know that it’s only a matter of time before this game makes you scowl ashamedly and beg us to leave you alone, so we are enjoying it while we can. You seem to like your papa, which makes me very pleased, and this escalates into a rising spiral of mutual adoration. You gurgle happily when papa comes home. No more of that blank who-the-hell-is-this-titless-guy? stuff. You are a real interactive little person, no longer just a parasitic little sucky mammal. So far in so little time.

His tiny
passport

Speaking of far, we’ve laid the groundwork for a very long trip for you: your tiny passport arrived just two days ago and the tickets are bought: you’re flying to the New World to meet your other set of grandparents in just two short months. The idea of flying with you strikes terror into our hearts, but it’s got to be done. Your mother has already pledged not to worry about the other passengers. Let them all go to hell. Never heard a baby fox caught in a leg-hold trap before? To hell with you!

Adam’s apple

Unfortunately, I do not believe, even this far into the millenium, that all jet aircraft are equipped with the appropriate video equipment for viewing Telebajski Vsepovsod in an endless loop, and that is the one sure means we’ve found recently of focusing your attention, particularly during meal time. Without Tinky Winky, Po, and those other intermediate Teletubbies I know not what we will do with you. Your mother says, “I don’t know what it is about these horrible creatures that he likes so much. I like Teletubbies because I can feed him whatever I want when they’re on.” Memo to my mother: if you are reading this and you do not rush directly out to locate a Teletubbies video before we arrive, well, it’s on your own head. By ‘it’ I mean the mashed apricots.