Adam: 20 months in
Hi Adam. Let’s get right into it: this is the month that you cracked me in the face. We were playing with your animal sounds puzzle, the one that’s made of extra-thick plywood so that it can accommodate the batteries that generate the meows and woofs and whatnot when you match the animals with their voids. Extra-thick plywood. You were getting all excited by the guinea pig sound and when I bent over to help you rotate the frog, you whipped the extra-thick plywood upwards and with a mighty KER-ACKKKK you caught me in the supraorbital ridge with a sharp corner of the extra-thick plywood of your puzzle base.
Did I mention that the plywood you cracked me in the face with was EXTRA-THICK? My eye socket still hurts, and this was over a week ago. Of course, this is not the first time you’ve inflicted pain on us, nor I am sure is it to be the last. But it’s a sort of disturbing trend. A few days before, you’d done an atomic drop on your mother’s head as she lay with her ear against the parquet. (She was less than pleased.) You’ve grown through the phase of hurling yourself off the furniture and now hurl yourself or other objects at us. Breaking you of this, before you break yourself or us, is Priority One.
Or maybe Priority One is getting some food into you. Food, not juice. In recent times you’ve gone from a reasonably compliant eater of nearly anything at hand to what the catalog describes as “Baby: Non-eating model”.
I am not exaggerating when I say that in the last month you’ve eaten less than you used to eat in a typical week. You’ll pound sippy-cups of juice til your belly distends, but you refuse to take in much of anything solid. What gives? Your hams are withering away, stick-baby. Oh, and your mother has had it with trying to entice you with culinary artistry.
Actually, you’re not entirely without appetites. It was in the last month that you stumbled upon our bag of Ritualistic Friday Night Video Rental Gummi Bears, left open and at baby-level through an oversight resulting from mixing Gummi Bears and gin. The idea of you knowing about Gummi Bears fills us with dread, but since that one horrifying binge you seem to have forgotten that they are a viable food option for babies.
Speaking of videos, recently Thomas the Tank Engine has really come into his own. I think it all began when your mother bought you a small Harvey to take on the airplane to Spain. You had seen the videos here and there, but your reaction really fell into the camp of ‘meh’. Since we got back from Spain, though, you’ve been all about Thomas. To the point where your mother and I can recite every single line of every episode of every DVD. You get Thomas during lunch and then again with your pre-bed bottle, and we are just beginning to try to leverage your desire to watch Thomas against your refusal to eat or to drink milk. I’ll let you know how that goes for us.
Language acquisition continues, though you still refuse to say ‘papa’ except right after I’ve left the room, when your mother tries to con me into thinking I’ve just missed it. It is very interesting, though, to watch (hear) your phonetic inventory expand unit by unit. The amazement your mother and I felt when you first mimicked Thomas’s ‘PEEP-PEEP! ’ was perhaps disproportionate but it felt great just to hear you vocalize. So now I know you can manage a frickin’ voiceless bilabial stop, why won’t you throw me a ‘papa’ ? To be fair, you still aren’t saying much. ‘Juice’, ‘shoes’, ‘shell’, and a few other words featuring those delicious fricatives. It’s really interesting to watch your comprehension mushroom, too. Pretty much anything we tell you, you understand if it suits you to understand. We undress you for your bath and hand you your clothes, saying ‘do pralki ’ and off you scamper to put them in the washer.
Even if we’re not talking to you, you often react to what we say; if I use the word ‘red’, you run to the Lego® bin to pull out a brick of the appropriate color. We were really amazed the other night when I happened to say ‘apple’ and you went to the CD shelves and pulled out “Let It Be” based on the tiny logo on its spine. In addition to knowing where to find an apple, you’ve now been along on two visits to the OB-GYN, so you’ve seen the moving pictures of the next baby and you now seem to grasp the concept of where this baby is forming. When we first began adding Baby Aleks to the ‘where is…?’ list, you would point to the laptop on which we’d shown you the ultrasound images. Now you know where your brother/sister is forming. And we’ve almost trained you to stop bouncing there.
As well as becoming more aware of the language soup around you, you’re paying more attention to how much attention we pay to you, and taking steps to increase that amount by whatever means necessary. I’ve mentioned before the intense howling you can deploy, and there’s still plenty of that when you’re thwarted. But you’re also getting more subtle. A new development this month is the herding you do, dragging us around by thumb or finger, or even trouser fronts or underwear hems, positioning us just where you want us. This is usually on the floor amid a rubble pile of Legos®. You’ve also started grabbing me by the chin and readjusting my gaze quite firmly if you catch me glancing at the television when I’m supposed to be playing with you. Good lessons.
You’re on the right path. We’ve been pleased with your performance overall this month. Try to maintain the same high standards until your next review.
Just lay off the Funyuns®. And you can quit cracking me in the face any time.
