isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Your post’s a day late this month, Adam. As I write this you are suffering from a nasty virus. Maybe ‘suffering’ is not exactly the right word, because you seem more cheerful than I’d expect from a baby with a fever that’s been hovering over the last day and a half around 38° C, down from a truly frightening high a hair over 41°. Maybe I should say it’s your mother who’s suffering.

My god, the HOWLING. When the virus first appeared. Shades of last spring, when you were still learning how to sleep. The blooooodcurdling baby-fox-in-a-leghold-trap keening. It wasn’t the fever causing you to make this sound, oh no. That was you complaining about the thermometer in your armpit. Let me emphasize that it was your armpit.

It was a scary thing. We had just been congratulating you, but somehow ourselves a little bit more, on what a healthy boy you’ve been overall. Then there was the shock of a raging middle-of-the-night fever, a frantic 4:00 am trip to the pharmacy, ER visit contemplated, and a pediatrician appointment shoehorned in thanks to your mother’s insistent telephone Slovene. I come home for lunch and you’re running up and down the sidewalk like nothing’s amiss. So I’ll continue with this day-late progress report as though nothing truly is, as you seem to be on the mend. But first, a few words on how intensely scared we were at the onset of this thing, and how it managed to concentrate an immense amount of love and dread into a few moments in the middle of the night. And though now the fear has abated, the physical toll this has been taking on your mama still shows. She’s taking VERY good care of you.

Adam, please get off my foot. Thank you.

It seems like a long time since I wrote a normal monthly report. Last month’s you had to share with the new brother/sister your mother is baking, since that was such exciting news and all. This month the big news on that front is: STILL SICK AS A WHALE. Yesterday I was making my lame attempts to commiserate with your mama about how hellish it must be to feel like that all the time, and how when she was pregnant with you I wasn’t even around to witness it. She told me, “With Adam it wasn’t as bad…” and I was expecting the next line to be “…it only lasted a few weeks” or something like that. Instead she continued with “…because I had to go to work every day so I didn’t have time to feel sick.” That’s your mama.

Oh, there is this news, as fresh as Tuesday’s visit to the obstetrician: your future sibling is 4.5 cm long and was waving his/her arms and legs around for all to see. I hope you don’t mind this brief intrusion into your monthly report.

You’re standing on my foot again, and it is peeling all of the little hairs out of the top of it in a form of serious torture I have been trying in vain to accustom myself to in the last month. I really don’t know how all of a sudden you have this mania for standing on my bare feet in the most painful way you can devise. In a related topic, you’ve developed this bizarre fixation with shoes lately. We really don’t know what this is about. Maybe it’s because we’re wearing so few of them in this weather. Pretty much the only words you use are “mama” and “shoes”. If one of us happens to use that word, you’re off in a flash to bring us a pair of tiny sandals, like a dog reacting to the W-A-L-K word. When I come home from work, you can hardly wait for me to change out of my work clothes so you can put my loafers or monk-straps away while also pulling out every other pair of shoes from the cupboard, muttering sheesh, sheesh, sheesh all the time with great joy. This morning I looked over and your mother was collapsed on the sofa after a sleepless night of fever-monitoring, while you draped her inert feet with Birkenstocks. On our vacation you preferred playing with her sexy new clogs to eating sand on the beach. What is up with this?

When we could entice you to drop the clogs in favor of the beach, your favorite thing was your trucks. As I mentioned back in month 17, you like you some heavy equipment, and that fondness has only grown. You had yourself a little transportation empire, a fleet of trucks, and buckets and spades for loading them, yourself, and us up with plenty of sand. You also showed a great love for destruction, smashing sand castles, filling in moats, levelling any sand structure like some city-razing Babylonian — the same love of smashing you show indoors when any tower of buckets or Legos® begins to rise.

By far the most adorable, endearing (and clichédly so) thing you’ve picked up this month has been learning to kiss. Daj bużi, your mama tells you, and you clamber clumsy and damp up her chest and breathily clamp your wet, open mouth directly over hers. It’s about equal parts heartmelting, hilarious, and vaguely gross. But mostly that first one. We’ll have to teach you to be a little more subtle before the prom. Also predictably, you are only in the mood to do this about five percent of the time upon our urging. I guess that’s about five percent more than you’ll be in the mood for sooner than we think.

Have I mentioned that we love you? We really do. You’ve been especially glommed onto papa lately, in proportions that give your mama satisfaction on a number of levels. I am sure that having so much more round-the-clock access to me during our recent holidays had a lot to do with that, and I hate to leave for work now if you’re awake. You seem so bereft. Before our trip to Spain it was like, so go. Now you howl and snuffle. Anyway, we do love you, but lately we’ve been noticing that you really can spend a lot of your time being miserable. Am I allowed to say that? Too bad. Just yesterday, even in the context of your viral fever, your mama was able to deploy the term ‘drama queen’ and I saw her and raised her a ‘boy who cried wolf’. It must be so hard to be you, the way you carry on sometimes.

Blame for this character trait will be apportioned later.

But you go ahead and howl all you want for now. We’ll still love you. Then we’ll break you of it. Or we’ll blame each other for having begotten such a whiner. While reminding ourselves that 18 is closer than we think.