isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Dear Adam,

First of all, let me say CZEŚĆ! This month’s report has really snuck up on me. It seems I just finished writing the last one. I suppose that this illustrates how quickly your tenth month of life has passed. This is the month that your father missed fully half of, too, being away for two weeks of it, and I recently wrote about how much you changed during that absence. Here’s some detail:

You are now fully mobile. There is nowhere in our apartment you can’t get to, if by nowhere we mean nowhere lower than 70 cm. You crawl around like a wind-up beetle until your face bashes into something, at which point you hoist yourself upwards, using your mouth and forehead as supplemental points of contact if necessary, until you are in a standing position. The standing thing came practically overnight and needed almost no refinement; you use your hands to steady yourself but don’t seem to care about it or even need to do it. You don’t have a death grip on supporting materials even when you should, unless the supporting materials are our flesh or hair, in which case you hold on really, but REALLY, tight. You are very close to taking some actual steps, largely because it doesn’t seem to occur to you that you couldn’t. With the ability to stand came a sense of fearlessness. Your mother and I actually wish you were a little more fearful, because it’s a fine line between brave and bonking. The gravity in our apartment is not selectively distributed. You know perfectly well that it works in the area surrounding your high-chair, because when you are bored with something, let’s say banana moosh, you let it drop with an air of dismissive ennui, knowing that gravity will play its proper role in making the spurned object or substance disappear from your jaded sight. When crawling rapidly along the bed or sofa, however, you seem to think that there is a special gravity dispensation for you along the edges, and that you can barrel off them with impunity. Get real.

In fact, you’ve already chipped one of your teeth by crashing yourself into the coffee table. The coffee table has since been removed from the living room, not coincidentally. Your mother is most bothered by the minor tooth-chipping. Your attitude seemed to be, once the blood flow was staunched, so what, I’m already working on more teeth. Now outtamyway.

To return to the wind-up toy analogy: it only goes so far, because wind-up toys quickly wind down and run out of energy. Your mainspring is well capable of delivering 13 hours of service interrupted only once daily for a brief early-afternoon recharge. We can’t figure out what you run on, in spite of the fact that you do eat pretty much constantly. Still, it’s hard to believe that squash and cauliflower could pack enough calories to fuel such a perpetual-motion machine. You show great dexterity in manipulating objects, especially those you wish to eat. I’m thinking cornflakes, here, but also cardboard and shoes. Your latest obsession is grissini, the skinny little brittle bread sticks that are widely available here on the isogloss. You can bite little chunks off the ends of them with your razor-sharp front teeth, but you can’t consistently grind them to swallowable paste due to a persistent lack of molars. So we find sad half-soggy bread-twigs scattered everywhere in the apartment like flotsam. You never stop moving. You practically bounce around the place, and off stuff, especially us. There is no chance for a gram of fat to attach itself to you anywhere. You remind us of a loin of pork: long, thin, and all lean muscle. Okay, a loin of pork that requires constant supervision and intervention to prevent traumatic dental damage.

This month, with the crawling and all, I’ve managed to identify my favorite, absolute favorite, five second period of the day: when I come through the door circa five o’clock, and you slowly realize that you and mama aren’t alone anymore, and you turn around to see who the hell could be interrupting your all-mama-all-the-time time, and see that, hey, it’s papa! and come surging across the parquet like the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, big grin pasted across your froggy face.

I think your mama might like those five seconds, too.