Kid Amnesiac

Simon continues to cruise and pull up, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that he’s a physically timid child. He’s just not that excited about doing anything he’s not sure he can do pretty well, and he scares easily.

On the other hand, he loves being outside when it’s sunny, so yesterday Matt and I exploited this and took advantage of some reasonably warm, very sunny spring weather by heading off to a park. It’s been a long time since Simon got to swing, but he remembered the fun and giggled like mad all the while Matt and I pushed him. We could have swung all day, but the slide beckoned.

Last summer, Simon would go down the slide on my lap and the results were mixed. Sometimes he thought it was fun, and sometimes he’d look stunned and his lower lip would tremble. Yesterday he liked it off the bat, and Matt and I decided it was time for a solo trip.

I have to say that watching your child discover a new pleasure is a singular joy. We held his hands when he went down a few times, and Simon thought that was a blast. Then we tried to get him to go down solo. Once or twice he pushed himself off and went down completely solo, and once or twice he grabbed onto the side of the slide and went down on his side and at an angle. He appeared to enjoy both methods equally well.

Emboldened by his success and unusually game attitude, it was time for the long tunnel slide. Not being 32″ tall, there was no way I could help Simon on this one. I stood at the top, Matt stood at the bottom, and on a signal I pushed my baby down and hoped he would not summer-sault along the way or arrive at the bottom in a hysterical fit. I think he was a bit stunned, but he was also clearly intrigued. So we tried again. This time the push came harder, he went down faster (a bit too fast I think), and he giggled all the way.

At this point, we sensed we should stop while we were ahead and called it a day. If only we had been so wise later that day, when Matt and I pushed our limits with Simon and were rewarded with a miserable, borderline hysterical boy. I’ll blog about that unpleasant lesson later. time…

It may be a bit premature to call it an “explosion,” but Simon is picking up new words at a faster clip these days. At least, we think he is. At times the line between parental translation and wishful thinking is razor thin.

Having said that, we honestly think Simon has said the following:

“dir doe” This is Simonese for “dirty dog”, his little puppy blanket toy

“bu-see” Percy, our nickname for Percival

“dock” Duck

“no!” self explanatory, but new for him

“do!”    a. we think maybe “throw”

b. but also certainly “dog”

“ah shee” we’re worried this is potty language. Please don’t let this be potty language.

“rah thah” a reply to the question “Where’s mama’s nose?”

I know I’m forgetting others, but when you add these to his words for mama, daddy, ball, bye, yes, light, “what’s that?”  nose, cat, and a bunch of things he’s said once or twice, we’re starting to get a reasonable count.

His comprehension, however, is still murky. For example, anything round is a ball. This includes the moon in several of his books and polka-dots as well. I’m afraid he may also be a bit confused about eyes. When I ask him where mine are, he reaches out and touches my glasses. Then Tuesday, when my mom asked Simon where her eyes were, he reached out and touched her glasses, too. Except she wasn’t wearing them; they were in her hand.

I can see how having bespectacled people ask him to point to eyes could have confused him, but it’s still a funny mistake. Then again, in my case at least Simon may be correct, as my glasses truly are my eyes.

From early days, Matt decided he wanted to be called “papa.” To reinforce this, we used the word a lot in our regular goings on. We talked about “papa”, played peek-a-boo with “papa” and labeled Matt as “papa” in pictures with Simon.

Simon, however, had other ideas. As soon as he mastered ‘mama’, he began calling Matt “daddy”. Actually, he called him “da-da”, “da-di” or “ya-gi” pretty indiscriminately, but a “papa” was never heard.

In the face of this defiance, Matt held firm. He still called himself “papa”. He still labeled photos as “papa”. Heck, he even renamed all the “daddies” in our books to be “papas”.

No dice. Simon consistently, in a tone reserved for Matt alone, would look up at Matt with an impish smile and gleaming eyes and call out “da-di”. I thought Matt’s insistence on being called “papa” was funny, but I also though he was fighting a losing battle.

“Listen honey,” I’d say. “Your baby loves you. He’s got a special word just for you, he only uses it for you, and that word is ‘daddy’. You’re going to have to let this ‘papa’ thing go.”

“But I’m ‘papa’,” Matt would reply. “And where did he get ‘daddy’ from anyway? We’ve never used that word.”

“Whatever, honey. You’re ‘daddy’ now. Give it up.”

We’ve had this conversation, in more or less the same words, every day for several months now. It even became a little game with me. I knew that I could get a rise out of Matt by faux innocently referring to him as ‘daddy’.

About two weeks ago, the game lost it’s charm. Because Simon finally looked up at Matt and called him “papa”? you ask. No. Because for the past two or three weeks Simon has been calling me “dada” with alarming consistency. To which I reply, in an all-too familiar refrain, “No honey, it’s ‘mama’. I’m ‘mama’.”

Last Thursday when I picked him up from Jim and Evie’s, Simon took one look me, burst into the biggest smile I’ve ever seen, and yelled out, “Yay! Dada!”

I’m sure Matt put him up to this.

I haven’t been ready for Simon to get his hair cut. Even as everyone all around me made it loud and clear that his bangs were too long and that he had far too much flowing hair in the back, I’ve been holding out for unshorn locks.

“He’s a baby,” I’d think and sometimes say. “He doesn’t need a hair-cut yet. He’s got his whole life to be shorn in the back; right now he can have long, soft baby hair and be natural and beautiful.”

Except we are going to be seeing some old friends soon, and the hair was really bothering Matt. And we went to a special Kiddush luncheon for my Aunt Anita’s 70^th birthday party yesterday (Happy birthday, Aunt Anita!), and saw tons of family there, too, including some I hadn’t seen for a decade. Many commented on Simon’s hair. About two-thirds flipped the back of his hair and said something like “Boy, he’s ready for his first hair-cut, isn’t he?” adding fuel to Matt’s shear enthusiasm.

My cousin Mark seemed to know where I was coming from, though. “Three years,” he said repeatedly. “Cut his hair when he’s three.”

It’s a Jewish thing, specifically an Orthodox Jewish thing, which I am most certainly not but grew up adjacent to. Baby boys get their first hair cuts at three, not a day before, and their side-locks are left untouched. This first cut is called an upsherin, and I was vaguely and subconsciously holding out for one.

Specifically, it was the three years of unshorn hair I was longing for. My nephew Nathan had the most glorious golden curls you can imagine as a baby and toddler. His parents kept it long for a very long time, so he was allowed to run around with a wild leonine mane for at least two or three years. When he eventually got his big-boy cut, he looked extremely handsome and everyone was pleased. But I at least mourned the end of the cherubic hair and the innocent era it seemed to represent.

Simon’s hair is nothing like Nathan’s, though. It’s a pretty golden brown, but it’s very thin and has no curl. So he was never going to have wild-child hair, and Matt and I simply don’t have the credentials to have our son pull off long, rocker hair like certain celebrity parents do.

So I finally agreed to a trim last night. I just wanted a tad off the front, enough to keep his bangs out of his eyes but no more, and a little off the back…. as little as Matt would let me get away with. Well, Simon went ballistic, and it was a pretty ugly scene. We had to forcefully restrain him, and he cried like mad. At one point, he reared his head mid-cut, and a section of bang ended up being shorter than I would have wanted and shorter than the rest, thus mandating the dreaded “evening up” maneuver.

Once we got the bangs evened out, it meant the back could no longer be long and flowing. We had to take it in tight, and it now follows the contours of his head. I held firm at not using clippers, but my little boy is currently sporting a total “little man” haircut. In fact, my father-in-law even called it that last night.

You can see my little man in all his glory at right. I’m still in a bit of shock over the whole thing, but I can at least admit that he does look awfully handsome with his new, echem, “older baby” do.

Well it’s official: The entire Goldstein-Whitworth family is now on suicide watch. And I couldn’t be happier. The watch has nothing to do with depression, this one is all about Simon’s burgeoning mobility.

Today he pulled up many times. How many I can’t say, because I honestly lost count. Given that between October and today Simon has pulled up once every 2-6 weeks, it’s safe to say that he pulled up more today than he has in his life combined. He pulled up in the living room at least 3 times. He pulled up in the bathroom at least once, leaving behind lots of toiletries on the floor as evidence. He pulled up at least 6-8 times in his bath tonight, then had fun “falling” down and making a huge splash. And then he pulled up while drying off après bath on our bed.

But wait, there’s more. For at least five seconds or so, he stood unassisted in the bath. He pulled up, was holding his shampoo bottle or a bath toy, and was so absorbed in it that I think he forgot what he was doing and let go of the side of the bathtub. We could hardly believe our eyes.

Today Simon also experimented with leaning and stair climbing. The leaning game features Simon throwing toys into the tub, then leaning over as far as he can to pick them up. First he eased one foot off of the floor. Then he started to ease off the other, leaning over the edge and trying to balance like a see-saw over the side. It worked once or twice, but the third time he went tumbling over. I held on enough to keep him from hitting full-force on the porcelain, but not so much that he didn’t realize he was falling and feel alarmed. I have no idea if this was the right thing to do or an appropriate teaching exercise; I can’t find “what to do when you see your kids plummeting to their likely harm and/or demise” in any of my child rearing books.

Finally, for a kid who can’t walk, he sure has ideas about how he’d like to climb stairs. I used to “walk” him up the stairs by having him lift up one foot on the next step, then pull the second foot to meet it. Given how steep our back stairs are and how short his legs are, this seemed quite logical. Simon has decided that that’s too babyish, though, and now insists on putting his right foot on the first step and then dragging his left foot up to the step above that one. Needless to say, this technique requires much “help” from me.

So that’s why Simon is on suicide watch. I’m adding myself to the list because about three weeks ago I slipped on a toy, smacked a toe into our ottoman, and am now pretty sure I broke it. Then today I stepped on a jagged piece of plastic that Simon threw on the floor and cut the bottom of my foot. Hardly lethal, I know, I’m afraid I’m going to be pretty gimpy if this keeps up. And Matt is on the list because while he hasn’t tripped over anything yet, I see the guy nearly trip on the ground and down the stairs when nothing is in his way all the time. It’s just a matter of time…

Simon can now identify at least one body part, the nose. We’ve all worked on this off an on for a while now, but both Grandma and Bubbie got serious about it within the past week. As a result, you can now ask Simon to show you a nose, and he will put his little finger right on yours. I swooned to see this, of course, and am amazed yet again at how much these creatures can learn in a year and a half and how these amazing feats would gone unrecognized by me before I had a baby of my own. Tonight I think he even said “nose,” and that sent me completely over the bend.

He’s caught on to some other objects as well. If you ask Simon to show you the giraffe, elephant, or monkey from his animal train, he will pick up the correct animal. This feat was first witnessed by my mom, but I have now seen it repeated a few times.

We’re also entering an era of more advanced cruising. Simon is not wild about using the Pooh car at our house because it moves too fast for him on our wood floors. That’s a bit of a bummer. To perk me up, however, he has begun more adventurous cruising on his own along our couch, our ottoman, and his toy chest. He’ll take more than a few steps now, he’ll move from one object to another, he’ll reach to things like the moulding on his crib to get from one object to another, and he will even take a few steps towards me using my hands for balance but not support.

This development has come in only the past two days, and I’m thrilled by it. Will Simon walk by 18 months? It’s still a long-shot. But at least now I’m seeing real progress that is coming all from him. He wants to do these things, he’s trying them on his own, and he’s pleased as punch when he pulls it off. I think the desire as much as anything is what is buoying me.

Between the cruising and the pointing, I tell you, there has been an awful lot of clapping on Cowling Avenue this past week.

I honestly didn’t think this happened to babies, but today Simon suffered his first ever Bad Hair Day. Bubbie managed to fix it in the end, but I’m afraid Matt and I could hardly look at him without laughing last night and this morning.

It began with bath time. After Simon enjoyed his evening soak, featuring the now routine throwing over the edge of the bath toys, drinking of the (pre-soap) bath water, and picking up and setting down of the baby shampoo bottle (his favorite bath toy), we took him into our bedroom and nestled him within three bath towels. He was in a sleepy, silly mood, and at one point he fell backwards onto Matt.

Since the fall didn’t bother him, we played for a good 30 minutes with him lying on his back. We’d laugh as he grabbed his feet and clapped them together, and laugh some more when he’d set his pacifier in his toes and then transfer it back to his hands or mouth. And for much of the time, we giggled ourselves sick over the raspberries Simon and I blew back and forth at each other.

Then we sat him up to read a story and saw the hazards of letting his hair dry while he was reclining: his hair was sticking up every which away. It was crazy. The front was fine, but the back was a mass of swirls and wings going in eight directions at once. Matt and I giggled some more and put him down for the night without much thinking about it.

Then this morning, it had somehow gotten worse. He must have slept on his stomach and his hair must have not been 100% dry, because when he awoke the front of his head had joined the party the back started the night before. More hilarity ensued, and sometime before Mom fixed it I began to think of another certain someone whose hair famously and fiercely also sticks up in multiple directions at once.*

So funny or fierce? You decide.

* For those of you not in the know, pictured is enfant terrible and Project Runway Season 4 winner Christian Siriano.

It finally happened! After months of waiting, wishing, hoping, and worrying, today Simon reached a baby milestone I thought I’d never see.

He crawled.

Not what you were expecting? Yea, well, that’s two of us. He’s been rocking back and forth on his knees for a few weeks now, and I kept thinking that one day he’d push himself up and walk. Frankly, at seventeen months, I just assumed the window had closed on crawling and that Simon would go straight from scooting to walking. But today he crawled just a little bit to get something beyond his reach.

What I can’t decide is whether this means walking is closer or farther away now. Is any new means of locomotion a good thing, or has he just taken a leap backwards and now is on track to walk at 22 months? I’m sure my soon-to-be good friends at First Steps, the folks who will be coming over to help out when Simon is not walking in five weeks, can tell me.

On the other first front, Simon also had his first drink of coffee today. And before you freak out, let me assure you that it was decaf. Matt brought back drinks from Heine Brothers for an afternoon break today, and, per the usual, Simon went nuts when he saw my cup. It’s not just that he loves cups. It’s that only the cup I’m drinking from will do, and he will crab and moan and bend over in frustration until he gets it or I give up and hide it.

Today I put up with this fussing until I had about ¼ of my latte left and I was sure it was lukewarm. Then I handed the sucker over and decided to let Simon reap what he sowed. I assumed-much as I did when I gave him his first piece of licorice-that he’d make a horrible face and want nothing to do with it after the first taste. Well, also just like The Affair of the Licorice, I was wrong. He struggled to figure out the cup since it had a lid on it, but once he got everything lined up properly he chugged away.

That’s my mom’s grandson! I’m pretty sure I was weaned onto milky coffee myself and that my mother is baffled by my own strong preference for tea.