isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Dear Adam,
Recently we were looking through lots photographs of you from the last year and a quarter and we were marvelling at how much you’ve changed over time, but how incremental that change has been. There have been a few occasions of sudden and quantum spurts of growth or development. Sometimes they’ve been physical (e.g. TEETH just appearing overnight^[1]) and sometimes they’ve been behavioral (like the sudden walking). But they’ve been rare, and since I last wrote it has been a month of incremental little strides for you. Your 15^th has been something of a plateau month for you. Consolidating the gains you’ve made since turning one year old.

This is not to say that there haven’t been some thrilling developments. I could cite the occasion last week when I frogmarched you out to the living room to grimly announce to your mother, “Your son has been drinking from the toilet.” No kidding: stooping ferally over the lip of the bowl and scooping handfuls of savory toilet-water into your mouth. The bathroom has become a source of wonder to you. If we go in there and presume to close the door you howl and keen outside as if we were excluding you from joining us in making candy with the Teletubbies in there. If the door is closed but not on the latch, you slam it open imperiously and storm in to see what we are up to.

It’s been several months since you decided, again, that your evening bath ritual is a great thing, and that certainly makes our lives easier than during the previous cycle, when you reacted as if we were The Penguin and you were Batman being lowered into a vat of sulfuric acid^[2]. Recent small changes to the bathtime pageant include:

• Drinking of bathwater (own)
• Selective internment of members of bathtime posse in bidet
• Refusal to bathe in any position other than standing
• Addition of small buckets with which to pour, drink, and disperse bathwater lo unto the very corners of the bathroom

Also in bathroom news: you’ve become an avid flusher of the toilet, whether it needs it or not^[3]. Brushing your own teeth is gradually becoming a skill. This last one puts you on the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, you hate it with all of your tiny heart; on the other, if Mama or Papa are brushing their teeth you want to emulate that activity. What tips the balance, I think, in favor of brushing vs. not brushing is Mama’s brilliant selection of some Italian-made strawberry-flavored dentifricio.

You are all about strawberries this month. The first ones of the season, rather large and woody and non-juicy and sub-satisfying and overpriced, appeared in the shops recently and on instructions from Mama I brought home a package of them. They immediately became your fruit of choice for the Afternoon Fruit Snack portion of your provisioning. Probably not coincidentally you now love, and I mean LOVE, to haul out your increasingly battered, tattered copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and turn straight to the page that shows our hero eating his way through four strawberries. I think you identify with him, and it’s important to have role models. This book is inevitably the first thing you pull out of your toybox in the morning, and you read and re-read it throughout the day, very meticulously placing your tiny index finger into the caterpillar-bored hole in each piece of fruit and pronouncing the name of the fruit, as near as you can approximate^[4], in a loud and authoritative voice. Or, preferably, you will drag Mama or Papa by their index finger toward the book wherever it may be located, and use their finger like a stylus to point out each piece of fruit as we name it. It’s safe to say that your passive lexicon includes, in order of preference:

• Strawberry
• Orange
• Plum
• Caterpillar
• Pear
• Apple
• Pickle

There’s this emerging fascination with books and shredding reading material in general. You also love your copy of “Goodnight, Sweet Butterflies” and can cross-reference now, moving from GSB to TVHC’s page where (after making an utter pig of himself) he turns into a butterfly, and you also like to locate the pictures of oranges in both books. This knocked us over the first time you did it, and we can see that you are getting smarter all the time in little ways like this.

You also now are entirely fixated on your floppy terry lion, or Straszny Lewek, and seem to make the connection between the stuffed animal and the waggish, stuffed-shirt lion character on Teletubbies. You love this lion, and drag him everywhere with you around the house and insist on using him as a pillow. As your mother put it a few days ago during a missing lion crisis, “no lion, no sleeping.”

Before I forget, while we’ve got the sofa in the background there, what’s with this stage-diving from the furniture? This fearless side of you gives us the willies^[5] sometimes. Your latest diversion is hauling yourself onto the sofa or armchair and hurling yourself off it into the void, trusting that some adult will be there to catch you. So far, so good. Except for that one time…

Magda: Why? Why did you teach him to do that? Why?
Me: I, um, I didn’t teach him to do it. I don’t think…
Magda: I’m killing you.

This month also marks a first for you, which is Baby’s First Haircut. The back and sides were getting a bit shaggy and flipping up into curls which, while adorable, interfered with your red sauce consumption and also added to the likelihood that you’d be mistaken for a little girl, something your Mama can’t abide. So she pulled out the nail scissors a few nights ago and had at you while you were sedated by Teletubbies and therefore not wriggling like a methed-up python. Now you’re looking trim and natty, not quite so much like the guy from the Spin Doctors.

Ironically, two days after this Young Republican make-over, we heard a guy at the playground warn his child to be careful of the little punca [girl child] at the top of the slide. The only kid standing up there was you. Your mother’s nails sliced into her palms.

Other firsts: first getting it together with the spoon, by which I mean using it as a vehicle, rather than a launcher (slideshow covers this); first drawing (also included in the slideshow for those who must see yet another Pollockian crayon scribble); first spanking (see sofa-diving).

These watershed moments aside, it’s been a rather quiet month for you as you grow into your boy’s body and little boy’s habits. One habit in particular I love, though your Mama may not agree: you wake up earlier and earlier, ready to run and play and be free. You emerge from the back of the house in your jammies looking drowsy and slightly confused but excited to have another whole day for playing or furniture-diving, and this means that I get to see you before I leave for work. You scamper out, pausing at the toybox to dig out your treasured copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” and clamber up into my lap to wish me a pre-linguistic good morning and see what I’m up to at the glowing screen and seize my finger for pointing at the strawberries — which tends to cut into my time for writing letters like these, but is entirely worth the change in my morning schedule. Thanks for helping me get my priorities straight.

^[1] This just in: new teeth incoming!

^[2] I realize that this analogy falls apart when you consider the stoicism with which Batman faced such situations.

^[3] Mostly NOT; any “if it’s yellow, let it mellow…” policy that may have been in place before has now been changed due to the toilet’s new role in thirst-slaking activities.

^[4] As of this writing, all fruits are pronounced “BWAGH!”

^[5] No offence intended to any readers named Willy