isoglossia

So, Adam,

Lately you may have noticed us saying quite a bit, “I can remember when you were this big,” where ‘this’ is indicated by thumb and forefinger held one angstrom unit apart. One year ago today you were a bit bigger than that, but only a little bit.

Because this forum was called into being a few months into your life, weeks after the last of the slime had subsided, I’ve put up this picture, taken one year ago this evening in the Šempeter-pri-Gorici hospital’s maternity ward. And here are you and me a few days later:

Say “happy birthday” to your mother, Adam. In your first instance of great timing, you managed to arrive just in time to be her second birthday present (the first being a Harpic Ready-Brush), at the same time rendering your Polish grandmother giddy with glee at being correct in predicting your birthday. In fact, she had phoned us up just moments before your mother’s water broke to tell us it was about to do so, and so your arrival a few hours later seemed like rigid obedience, always a welcome quality in a new Polish grandson. Your mother was annoyed that you were so compliant in making her mother right yet again, but by now I think she’s forgiven you.

Here’s you on your first Christmas, getting the best present of all: a nice, clean, fresh, dry diaper. Maybe this year, with all of your North American family, you’ll do a little better. Or do without! Yesterday, on your very first try, you peed in your little potty. The raw talent…

Speaking of family and grandparents, Adam, I am so glad that you agreed to travel with us to Maine in August, and to meet your American grandfather there. Again with the impeccable timing. He held on long enough to meet your newest cousin a few weeks ago, but could not quite make it to your first birthday. I’m happy that you met him, but sorry that you will never have the chance to know him. I will have to tell you all about him once this lump is gone from my throat and the strange salty ocular discharge subsides. And if you will someday shut up for one damn minute.

On the topic of shutting up, and ‘damn’, your first birthday puts you on the very verge of those two developmental milestones of walking and talking. You can almost do each, and even both simultaneously. The speech part has us watching our own language, and we are taking extreme measures to sanitize it so that you don’t suddenly turn into a tiny little pottymouth. It’s something of a Catch-22, however, because we mostly only want to curse because of you and the things you do. Okay, and occasionally when we take the stainless steel gimlet-corner of the stove-hood in the temple when reaching for the olive oil. Not entirely your fault, that one. So for each time when our inner longing begs to shout out the F-bomb or denigrate your lineage, we have decided to substitute ‘Malkovich‘ for the expletive, for reasons that should be obvious. So a ‘normal’ conversation between your long-suffering mother and me might run something like this:

Mother: Will you take this blud—Malkovichy baby from my knees while I make his fuu—Malkoviching supper?
Father: Come here, you little bas—Malkovich [baby opens rubbish bin, rummages, eats].
Mother: MALKOVICH!
Father: What’s he having for supper, other than trash?
Mother: The little Malkovich won’t eat anything anymore, so he’s getting Malkoviching hrenovke again.
Father: [Slams head into stainless steel stove-hood corner] MALKOVICH MALKOVICH!

We don’t think this should cause any problems in your language acquisition.

You’ve developed some new interests and hobbies lately. Most of them involve opening and closing things, inserting your head, removing, tasting, and either replacing or destroying the contents, and repeating. It all began with the clothes washer, as mentioned last month, and now encompasses all the drawers, doors, and wee dark spots in the house. We have taken most of the sharp-edged, highly toxic, or fragile items out of these drawers and cabinets and replaced them with decoys. Notice I say ‘most’ and ‘highly’, just to keep you guessing! We have also invested, no exaggeration, 11,000 SIT in baby-defeating countermeasures, such as cabinet and fridge latches, high-tech doorstops and pinch-mitigating devices, but someone has not had time to install nearly all of them because someone else is just a little too much of a spazzer 100% of the time. We look forward to watching you grow into new and richer hobbies, though the time-honored one depicted here, in your first few days of life, is unlikely to fall out of vogue:

Happy Birthday, Adam, and Happy Birthday, Magda. It seems incredible, quite literally, that it’s been a year already. So much has changed in that time. In a few days it will be time to travel again, back to New England to remember and honor your grandfather. I know that this will be a stretch for you, since you can’t remember the existence of gravity, and you honor little beyond the Teletubbies and grissini, but it’s important for me that you be there. One day you’ll know why.