A Bevy of Thoughts

The squeaker told me he had a whole bevy of toys out in his playroom.

“A what?” I asked.

“A bevy,” he replied, and then, seeing my puzzled expression, he added helpfully, “of toys.”

Yikes. Where does he get these words?

The pipsqueak has become the speediest crawler ever. Of particular interest to him are the refrigerator and the dishwasher. Seeing them open results in turbo crawling, because there is clearly supercool stuff in there. A bevy of supercool stuff, in fact, and mom keeps it hidden.

It’s a strange life, isn’t it? The weeks slip by so quickly, and as the pipsqueak reaches these milestones (he started clapping his little fat hands together this week!), I am left feeling kind of sad and reflective.

My great-grandmother said that one day she looked in the mirror and saw an 80-year old face looking back at her, and she wondered how that had come to pass so very quickly. I get this feeling that these moments – the happy crawler, the squeaker and his big words, snoozing in the sunshine, snuggling under the blankets on a cool spring night – are the only ones that really matter, and yet it’s so hard to focus on the moment. I am always planning tomorrow – what I need to do, when I need to do it, how I can accomplish it as quickly and easily as possible. What’s going on at the moment almost seems irrelevant, because I am too busy for it. Not literally too busy, but too busy mentally.

I wonder why that is. I have a pretty simple life with relatively few worries. I have a husband who does at least his share of housework and child care. I work only half time, so I have plenty of time with my boys and yet I still get to do work that I enjoy and find meaningful. I am healthy and generally happy. My extended family lives near me, and they are loving and supportive.

But sometimes it strikes me how alone we all are. We are part of these different family units – brother, sister, father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent – and part of these other circles of human beings – friends, co-workers, members of various communities – but we are separate and apart, with our private dialogues running in our own heads and our own singular perspective on everything we hear, see, smell, taste, and touch. We can share experiences and even have similar perspectives, but we are still fundamentally alone at the end of all things.

I know, I know – this tension between alienation and community, the self and the other runs through a millennia of literature and art. It’s just strange to me how it is an ever-present subtext in the complicated webs of our lives.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I meant for this post to be about my boys, but somehow it ended up being my own clumsy musings.

Standing Up and Speaking Out

It's hard to believe, but the pipsqueak turned 8 months old yesterday.

He must be secretly reading our baby instruction manual, because he also learned how to pull himself into a (dreadfully scary, for us and for him) standing position over the weekend, which is one of the milestones for an 8-month old in our baby manual. (Yes, yes, I know, these milestones don't mean much, if anything, but we have kept the instruction manual around just in case. One never knows when it might be meaningful to look through the index for such entries as "napping; won't" and "teething; how to resist listing your kid on ebay when it's 3 am and no one has slept for 36 hours").

Anyway, now he can stand, precariously and alarmingly for all of us. He likes it at first. He'll bop up and down to music and laugh out loud. Plus, he can now get to things his big brother thought were stowed safely away, which is great fun. But then, when he's ready to get back down but can't, he finds it's not so fun anymore. It even seems to occur to him that he might be stuck -- perhaps indefinitely, and certainly for the moment. This leads to either 1) whimpering for quick rescue; or, more likely, 2) a spectacular fall, complete with the thud of head against floor. Ugh.

So we are hoping this stage passes quickly.

Also, the pipsqueak said "hi." The baby instruction manual makes it quite clear that it's too early for speech. But Friday afternoon, while his papa and I were sitting on the couch watching him play, he crawled over to us and pulled up to standing at the edge of the couch. Papa looked at him and said, "Hi!" And the pipsqueak smiled back and said, clear as a bell, "Hi!"

It's a sound he'd never made before, and we haven't heard it since then. The squeaker's first word was "dog"; it was like he wanted to get right down to business, learning all the animals possible (though naturally he applied it to all four-legged animals at first). Clearly, the pipsqueak is not going to abandon friendly small talk in quite the same way. What better way to begin speaking than with a "Hi!" to mom and dad?