Lepoprihranjen in hiperaktiven
Not that the internet has been raising a gigantic hue and cry over this, Adam, but your month 11 report was sub-par in both information and images. Now that you and your mama are back from Poland, I can set things right. I’ll start with the medical “news”. Yesterday your mother took you to see Dr. K at the Stara Gora hospital, and he pronounced you “well-fed”. This came as something of a relief after the previous night’s supper: your mother painstakingly stuffing skuta into tortiglioni, only to have you squish the soft cheese out and deliver the limp, empty pasta tubes directly to the floor like so many soiled prophylactics. You have decided that SPOON = SATAN and you will have no further truck with it. If you can’t jam it into your mouth directly with your shaking tiny fists of rage, you don’t want to, indeed WILL NOT, eat it. End of story. Oh, and you’re not so big on milk or formula, either, so getting you to ingest anything with calcium (yogurt, skuta, etc) is a big deal, and ongoing struggle. So hearing from your doctor that you’re eating well was pleasant news.
He also told your mother something else, not so nice, but in its way less surprising than the lepoprihranjen part. Your mother passed this news on to me when I got home from work yesterday. “Dr. K says that there’s a small possibility that Adam is a ‘hyperactive baby’. So now it’s official.”
Dr. K also speculated as to how it just may be that the earth revolves around the sun, and it’s possible but by no means a clinical certainty that bees are the primary producers of honey.
From the very moment you awake, Adam, until your fitful limbs succumb to your mother’s insistent lullaby and tourniquet-like embrace, you are ON THE GO. Your crawling is incessant and high-speed. At eleven months, you have mastered the ability to hoist yourself up onto the sofa and the coffee table at lightning speed — faster if the remote, a mobile phone, or a fresh magazine is up there — and once there you flout the law of gravity. You take loud personal offence if thwarted, whether it’s me, your mother, or gravity doing the thwarting. Protecting you from yourself is just barely within the ability of one attentive, competent, sober adult human, but 14 hours of it can be a bit much even for two of them to share. Particularly if one of them meets all of the above criteria only rarely. Your mother recalls the pastoral bliss of America’s pre-Columbian era, as she must wear you on her back, papoose-like, in order to vacuum the wigwam. She waits all day for me to get home just so she can go to the bathroom without you crawling into the toilet like Ewan MacGregor.
All of this is to say that Dr. K’s second bit of news didn’t shock us. Rather, it was something of a relief to have a medical explanation for why your mother has aged 75 years in the last eleven months. Also to have some clinical underpinnings for some of the analogies drawn previously in this space, like, say, robotic beetle and Tasmanian Devil.
Routine events have become more and more of a struggle. In the bath you now want to pogo all the time. Food-hurling is becoming a favorite activity (of yours, not ours). Your mother recently announced, “Adam has a new hobby: putting his head in the washing machine.” Charming except during the ’spin’ cycle. And last night putting a new diaper on you made me think of nothing so much as frantic mariners putting a reef in the mainsail in a gale while rounding Cape Horn. Only with poop.
In spite of all this mayhem, I am very happy to have you both back. I am also glad that your mama took the camera to Poland. Smile.
Adam should have his own blog called “Tiny Fists of Rage”.
Comment by Sarcastro — Friday 18 November 05 @ 16.09 MST+2.00
He more or less does, don’t you think?
“Shaking tiny fists of rage” was the tag-line for a while back earlier this year. Sometimes we think it ought to be permanent.
Comment by sgazzetti — Friday 18 November 05 @ 22.16 MST+2.00