Baby’s First Word: sacroilliïtis
Officially I am blaming Lufthansa for the crippling back pain. Deep down I am pretty sure it’s something else, but being wedged into 25F overnight a few days ago seems like a possible culprit. Every time I fly I think that I must represent the upper end of the size-envelope anticipated by the airline seating bastards engineers. Another centimeter of height, weight, girth, or kneecap-thickness and it just wouldn’t work at all. I feel sorry for any freakish hulk towering taller than 178 cm (5′ 10″).
I have been back and forth across the Atlantic enough times recently for it to feel a bit ridiculous, though the reason for the return was ironclad. Thanks to everyone who expressed concern. I don’t feel that I need to go into details of the trip other than to say that the family emergency mentioned below, while in every way entirely worthy of jumping into the first empty airplane seat, was not quite as dire as expected. For which we are grateful enough that I won’t attempt to describe how grateful we are. I just couldn’t do it.
While I was away I missed Adam’s first word. The monthly progress reports are full of details of what an advanced and precocious baby we’re raising, but even so I was really stunned at how much a father can miss with just two weeks’ absence. The crawling and standing had been technically accomplished during the three weeks between trips 1 and 2 to America, but during late September Adam fully mastered both, including the speed-crawl sprint and the Elvis knee-wiggle. Having been there for the early R & D stages of those projects, I was not left feeling that I’d missed too much in the movement arena, but I was gutted when Magda told me about Baby’s First Word.
I know for a certain fact that Adam’s oldest Montana cousin’s first word was uh-oh, that glottal stop-rich favorite of the Teletubbies. I also seem to remember that she had a talking Po figure for a personal tutor who essentially guaranteed that uh-oh would be her first utterance, if not big hug. (Um, ugh). It wouldn’t have surprised me if Adam had followed in her footsteps, given that he is such a hardcore fan that he is physically incapable of ingestion without the Teletubbies being on.
Adam’s youngest cousin is a video fanatic, too, though a bit more mature in his tastes. He begs for some linguistic study. I would love to follow this kid around for a day with a tape recorder and then do some statistical analysis of the resulting corpus. At a guess, 70% of his lexicon is made up of the names of characters from the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. A typical monologue of his goes something like this:
“Thomas! Tracks! Gordon and James and Trevor. Emily. Thomas’s coaches: Clarabelle and Annie. Chocolate-covered Percy! James is blue*. Train!”
I am sad to say that I have no idea what my other nieces’ and nephews’ first words were.
Adam has been producing words for some time, of course. Previous candidates for Baby’s First Word have included:
ghoul
ghee
wow
feign
greed
clog
egg
chough
wig
wheeze
But all of these were later disqualified as one-offs, mere phonetic coincidences of the million-monkeys-typing-”Hamlet” variety. But while I was away he has learned to say, and to repeat with some regularity, the Polish word for hi:
CZEŚĆ
This is big. Huge, even. This is a word that I struggle to pronounce, with the three distinct sibillants stacked up in a one-syllable word**. He seems to deploy it with some sense of understanding its meaning, too, for example first thing in the morning, when it’s not unreasonable to say hi. And (and this is the true test of its being a word rather than a sound) he says it again and again.
This seems like a good compromise between mama and papa.
*Actually James is red. Thomas, Gordon, and Edward are blue. He’s still working on the colors.
**It’s that fresh cheese thing again.
