Kid Amnesiac

We had another first today: Simon pulled himself up to a stand. Yay, Simon!

Lately, we’ve been playing a 1-2-3-stand game. We both sit on the floor, I hold Simon’s hands in mine, we count aloud, and I pull him to standing on 3. After a while, he started doing some of the lifting himself, with me only nudging him along somewhat. But today, after several rounds of 1-2-3-stand, I got to 2 when Simon decided it was time to pull up and did so all on his own.

Excellent. He can stand holding on to furniture as well, but has yet to pull up on any furniture, probably because he still can’t crawl or scoot to get over to it.

Sigh. I know there’s nothing to be alarmed about here. I know he’ll develop in his own time, that boys are often slow, that he didn’t get much tummy time, etc., but the kiddo is getting beginning to fall behind those a full trimester behind him.

On the plus side, there is some real upside to Simon’s slight developmental tardiness. First, it doesn’t really matter than I installed the baby gates poorly and have now knocked both down. And second, I can still put Simon on the floor, go get something in another room, and know he’ll be where I left him when I get back.

I guess so long as a lazy baby means mama can also be lazy, it’s not so bad. Still, I’m glad he’s showing progress on other gross motor skill fronts.

A little late in the game, I joined the Jewish Community Center two weeks ago. Pool season is nearly over, but when it’s 103 degrees out, it’s about the only thing to do. Plus, I can start working out there and take advantage of the drop-in babysitting, J-Play, which charges a mere $2 for the first hour and $5 thereafter. That’s a heckuva lot cheaper than a nanny, let me tell you.

My first visit was a study in ethnic stereotypes. In the baby pool with me were several other moms. Two were quite slim, very blonde, extremely tan, and were watching over similarly blonde, similarly tan babies. One of the women was so dark that I have nicknamed her “shoe leather woman.” If you are a dermatologist, I think you would call this woman “job security.”

So we have our two skinny, tanned, blonde moms. Then there were the other moms. They had dark hair, not much in the way of tans, and ranged from pretty fit to pretty overweight to morbidly obese. Their kids? Also untanned. Also unblonde.

Can you tell Jew from gentile? I realize I could be wrong here. But I wouldn’t bet against me.

Simon’s experience at the pool has been mixed. He’s not always wild about the baby pool (maybe the tanned babies freak him out, too), but he loves getting in the family pool with me. We jump in the water, I lay him across his belly and simulate swimming, I put him on my belly and swim along on my back (sort of), and we generally frolic in the 3-4 foot zone. It’s a good time for both of us.

There have been to date only two complications. One is that the dear will not keep a hat on. It’s his second favorite game, next to “throw the object off the highchair” in hilarity. Last time I put the sucker on about ten times; Simon took it off just as many. This was much easier before he could grab things. The solution to this problem is zinc oxide, but it’s a messy solution at best and an eye-stinging solution at worst.

The second complication is that I want Simon to feel comfortable in the water, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. Most of the time I feel fine with making things up as I go, but two days ago we hit a bump. We were sitting in the baby pool together when I let go of him to reach something. Simon chose that exact moment to lose his balance and fall over backwards, completely submerging his head in the water. Before this, I had always made sure that his head stayed above water.

He looked up at me with open, startled, underwater eyes. And I looked back at him–briefly–with startled, terrified mommy eyes. Two seconds later he was sitting back up, and I was clapping for him. “Yay Simon! You went underwater and opened your eyes like a big boy!” He almost bought it. There was a tiny bit of crying, a fair bit of eye-rubbing, and several minutes of clinginess. Then he was ready for more adventures in the family pool.

Based on this display of bravery I am dubbing him, for the moment at least, Aquababy.

Simon has hit a few interesting milestones in the past several weeks. And after a lot of same ole’ same ole’ around here, they seem to have all happened at once. He’s a busy, busy baby.

1. “Mama!” Yup, Simon knows I’m his mama and he now calls for me. At first he said “mama” indiscriminately, but now it’s reserved for me. This is my favorite milestone yet. By a long way. (Props to Matt for working on this one with Simon.)
2. Object Permanence. We noticed a couple of weeks ago that Simon was starting to get object permanence. He’d watch a car come up our street from the window across from the bed, and once it went out of his field of vision, he’d turn to look out the window next to our bed to watch it continue up the street. He also looks for me if he hears my steps coming up the stairs or when we play peekaboo. But the new development is that if you wave an object behind him, he’ll begin looking at it from one side. When it disappears, he looks over his other shoulder, and if it doesn’t re-emerge he grabs behind his back to get it. Cool stuff!
3. Face recognition. Certainly some faces have been familiar and favorites for a long time. These mostly belong to primary care givers. But last week Simon recognized someone from Highland Coffee Company at the same time I did. And it wasn’t Erin, the day manager he’s totally in love with and has seen the most often. Cuter still, two days ago he picked up his copy of “Who Loves Baby?” (a book with photos of family members inside) and giggled and smiled the minute he opened it up to a page with pictures. (props to Evie on this one for setting up the book. For the longest time it had but one photo in it, of Aunt Barb. In fact, Matt and I had a little running joke in the house. “Who loves baby?” one of us would ask. “Poor baby,” the other would respond. “Your Aunt Barb is the only one who loves you.”)
4. Hand-eye coordination. Simon still has problems with his release, but his hand-eye coordination is getting better all the time. He’s better with a cup. He can self-feed crackers and cheerios. And last night he managed to put a ball into a pretty small opening of a toy. He’s also got pretty good hand-foot coordination, as I watch him pick things up and hold them with his feet, too. I’m part monkey myself, so this trait seems perfectly natural to me.
5. Teeth! His lateral incisors are in far enough that Simon is now sporting a vampire smile. However, thankfully, the central incisors have broken through at last. So the vampire smile will be short lived at least. I’m still thinking he should go as baby Dracula for Halloween.
6. Finally, not all milestones are good. Simon used to love his diaper changing table, but now he positively RAGES against it. I was warned about this by What to Expect the First Year, which described babies developing “turtle on its back frustration” at the procedure. That sums it up well. I can live with this, but I sure hope he continues to like baths.

Las Vegas is not my kind of town. I’ve been there at least once a year for business since 2001, and while I’ve more or less made my peace with it, I’m always relieved to get back home. The smoke, noise, and crowds on the strip and in the casinos take a physical toll on me, and philosophically, too, the place wears me down; I’ve always thought Vegas to be the ugly manifestation of American-style unchecked capitalism taken to its logical extreme.

Matt likes it even less than I do. I’ve learned to make the most of my time in Vegas by enjoying the great food, people watching, and shopping on offer when I’m not in business meetings. Once or twice I caught a show, too. There’s enough there for me to have a good time for a day or so until the aforementioned smoke, crowds, and noise make me long for home. Not so Matt. His Vegas strategy is to hole up in the nicest room his company will pay for, avail himself to television and room service, and never budge if at all possible. So far as I can tell, Matt’s best trip to Vegas was the time he stayed in the Venetian, whose elegant rooms afforded him a particularly luxurious and cocoon-like bunker.

It would seem that Simon takes after his old man where Vegas is concerned. He went with me to Black Hat this year, and it was a rough trip for him in many ways. He didn’t fly as well as he did on our last trip, he wasn’t as social as he was in San Francisco, and the general commotion of the place really upset him. Every time he went through a casino–which was every time he left the room to go somewhere else–he got fussy. Simon enjoyed the king size bed in our Caesar’s Palace room, several genuinely lovely and friendly members of the Caesar’s staff, the view from our room out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the giant bath tub, the fish tank in the Forum Shops, and not much else.

He was so-so at one dinner and downright miserable at another. He didn’t much enjoy being walked outside or inside the casino. He wasn’t nearly as social as he often is. And I truly think his several monster naps were, as with a depressed adult, an attempt to escape.

And speaking of escape, our options for getting away from it all were cut short right away. We rented a car on this trip so we could grocery shop upon arriving in Las Vegas and so that Matt could get around with Simon while I worked. I envisioned Matt using the car later to take Simon to one of the hotels with a baby pool and maybe to see some other kid friendly attractions, like the tigers at the Mirage or the gondolas in the Venetian.

Well, we were about halfway to the grocery–our first trip in the car–when Simon began to cry. As we continued on our way, the crying escalated into a terrible and uncharacteristic shriek. It turns out that the car seat we rented from Hertz was damaged. The shoulder harness portion was already suspiciously flimsy. We knew that. What we didn’t know was that the part that buckles him into the seat was completely broken. Our poor baby was left with his back and head pinned to the seat while his tush and legs remained unanchored and flailed out of it. By the time we reached Whole Foods, Simon’s entire torso was twisted and slumped. I literally held him in place on the trip to the hotel, and we didn’t use the car again until we left for the airport.

So much for having options. On the other hand, yesterday I’d swear Simon knew he was going home. He did better on his brief stroll in the Forum shops. He was great on the plane. He made many new friends and was his usual flirtatious self all along the way. He fussed much less than normal when we put him in his car seat. And, bless his little heart, when we reached the house at nearly midnight local time, he clapped. He was tired, somewhat underfed, and totally off his schedule, but the minute the car stopped at our back door, Simon woke up enough to clap. Coincidence? I think not.