Through the seasons

My chops for the narrative form are lacking. When I studied writing I was always chided that my stories were catalogues of detail, sometimes nicely observed but in general containing no dramatic keystones to brace the Narrative Arc of good fiction. "You're like eyes on a stick," my Pulitzer-laden personal heroine of twentieth-century fiction told me grimly in tutorial one day over a manuscript (dot-matrix-printed! The years, they are dizzying). "You see everything, but you participate in nothing." Fair enough. I think my best possible career, apart from the ink-stained drudgery I've chosen, would have been something like the work of Julius Knipl, real-estate photographer. Taking snapshots of a transitory, vanishing world. Photographs of dustballs and abandoned clothes, the things people leave behind when they suddenly jettison their homes and shops at midnight, one step ahead of the taxman.

Anyway. Herewith quotidiana about Flann; the only logical home for quotidiana is, after all, in a baby blog.

Flann is in a housework stage. He spills things for the pleasure of wiping them up. Yesterday I bought him a toy dustpan, sweeper, and broom, and he's dragged them all through the apartment looking for specks to rearrange with his bristles. At daycare dropoff I settle him by opening the toy closet and removing the toy Dustdevil and Dyson vacs (the latter has colored yarn and sparkles behind its window, to imitate the gerb one sees when using an actual Dyson). He assiduously vaccuums the playroom floor, pausing a single tearless moment for our goodbye kiss.

He's also in a Boy Boy Ultraboy Manchild stage. He is so physical. On the playground or in playspaces the little girls, active as they may be, often sit for many minutes sculpting sand mountains, pouring water from one cup into another, or arranging toys in geometric runes whose meaning is occult to all but themselves. Flann does concentrate on tasks, often for a notably long time, but then a tidal bore of energy rushes up through him and he must move. He's not a manic child; instead his movement is like that of a long-haul hiker. He wants to go up the hill, down the other side, across the river, round the next bend. I imagine he'll be hiking the Pacific Coast Trail by age twelve. Naked between diaper changes at home, he grabs up the model silver subway train Emily sent from the Brooklyn Transit Museum and runs laps through the hall with it, crowing and laughing, a baby Freudian archetype swinging that phallic train overhead.

And he is much in love with his father these days. Matt gets little time with him. His commute is long and Baatan-like and he must attend many nighttime performances in concert season. But when Flann arrives home he searches through the empty apartment, inquiring, "Dada? Dada?" around each corner, sometimes snagging an abandoned paternal sweater or sock to haul around after him. On weekdays mornings - their only guaranteed time mano-a-mano - the boy cannot be pried away from Matt. Should the padre abandon him for the bathroom, or to pour coffee in the kitchen, plaintive tears result. Together, with their big square heads, their happy-within-themselves maleness, arm in arm on the couch, they are an affectionate phalanx. My boy is member of a tribe that I can never join, but instead of sadness this brings joy. There is a larger world for Flanny beyond my limited self; he'll know things and feel things that I never will.

Owls, lilacs, cacti, roses, ladybugs, hummingbirds, and wild fennel: various obsessions Flann has lately gleaned from his books and his walks. Owls have flocked into the boy's psyche to such an extent that he now owns one stuffed barn owl chicklet, one full-size Gund Great Horned Owl, a book of owl babies, and a beautifully illustrated Owl and the Pussycat in which Owl is a smooth-talking Islands mon who inviegles his petticoated lady-cat into a year of moonlit sails through Caribbean seas before making an honest feline of her before an overstuffed British magistrate, played by a turkey in full display. It must be read to him every morning. It must be read to him every night. And he must sit with Matt in front of YouTube watching owl video after owl video, pausing to protest, "No! No! No!" whenever some sad-sack London Zoo employee or wildlife guide dares intrude into frame next to the Sacred Owl. Why the obsession? I suppose owls are both cuddly and soft - and the kid is obsessed with babies now - and fierce and terrifying. An ideal companion for for the liminal stage between babyish need and baby hunter-warrior boy.

Lexicon

Just returned from a profoundly depressing staff meeting—oh, I don’t know, they yattered something about how the American reading public is now a feral, impoverished mess far more interested in hunting down rats for its next meal than in purchasing our newest thousand-page semiotics tome, and how we all must do more with less, assuming we will still have jobs in which to do more. So to cheer myself up, I’ll do something I was warned specifically against doing by an old friend who had a sprat just after I did, a woman of nineteenth-century demeanor who disapproves of this whole narcissistic blogging mass neurosis, specifically when it comes to detailing the quotidian activities of our kids. Yes, it’s time to List the Words That My Kid Can Speak (sort of...well, words that my kid can make a wild attempt at, and which will be understood only by his biological parents).

ABC
again
agua
airplane
all done
apple
baa-baa (= sheep)
baby
banana
bean
bear
bot-bot (sippy cup)
bubble
bye
car
cat
cheese
cow
cracker
creek (“kee”)
Dada
doggie (“dah-dah,” as if every canine is his father)
down
ear
Elmo (sigh.)
hat
help!
hi
hop
hot
juice
light
lilac
magnet (“may-yah”; i.e., “Give me that tiny fridge magnet so that I may cast it behind the cat box”)
Mama
moo-moo
moon/mouse/moose/mouth (all “mouw”)
more
no
Obama
octopus ("oh-ki")
oh, no!
outside
owl
peas
pee-pee
pizza (creatively rendered as “ah-pi-pi”)
please (sustained "peeeee" appended to any demand)
poo-poo
potty
purple
sky
slide
soft (shorthand for blankie)
star
street (“stee”)
uh-oh
umbrella (“uh-yah-yah”)
up
water
word
yahoo!
yay!
yeah (pronounced as German Ja!)

Thank you for your indulgence. Next post, I promise to stray beyond the bounds of my own navel. And now, Flanny feeds goats. Or perhaps they are sheep. Small woolly things at any rate.

How I wish one would open in northern California

A completely outdoor preschool.

A real post soon. So say we all.

Noli me tangere

It’s not until one is sheepdogging a toddler that one notices the straight and narrow tracks that adults follow through the world. We drive straight down streets, walk straight down sidewalks, climb up the middle of stairs and clump back down along the same path. In stores we touch only the products we’re thinking about taking home. When we open the fridge we reach for one or two items and close the door straightaway, before the cold air leaks out. When we brush our teeth, we handle a particular set of objects in a predetermined and time-honored sequence: tap handles, brush, toothpaste tube. We’re like streetcars on steel tracks; we go where we’re allowed to go. I imagine our daily movements in space could be sketched via a few straight lines. Toddler movements, on the other hand, would be graphed via a feral snarl of loops and tangents and spirals. They want to go everywhere, handle everything, upend everything, look at the bottoms and backs and sides of all objects, open everything that is openable and most things that are not, transgress, invade, disassemble, unpack, and rearrange.

A walk with Flann is a walk with entropy. If we pass a car in a driveway, he must scoot all the way around it, investigate its front bumper, crow at the cat that’s taken refuge underneath it, peek mischeviously at me beckoning him away, and only then return to the sidewalk, whereupon he flings himself prone to investigate a pillbug and then skitters into someone’s yard to maul daffodils. All the invisible boundaries and Berlin Walls of private property are nothing to him. He’s sad in grocery stores, strapped into his little cart seat, because there are dozens of boxes of oatmeal that need opening, peppers that need be tumbled out of their bin, wine and seltzer bottles that properly should be brought down in a cataract of glass shards and fizz. Only in certain settings—our living room, a fenced tot park, the playroom and playground of daycare—can he roam as he likes, can he consider (almost) any object fair game. Everywhere else...ah, it’s endless latches and locks and closed doors and voices saying no. no. no.

The poor widget. All this restraint isn’t easy for him. The world is all flashing colors and strange angles and mysterious clockwork to him these days, a funhouse full of danger and joy, and yet always he hears no. no. no. It’s an unhappy paradox that during the years we most want to explore the world, we don’t have the sense or coordination to safely do it. In several years, I won’t worry about him tumbling off the fenceless bridge over the creek, or falling through the open risers of the concrete stairway bisecting the steep block near the park, or careening into a cactus or patch of poison oak in a stranger’s yard—but by then he likely will be uninterested in the creek, that odd steep stairway, the neighbor’s intriguing horticultural selections. Instead he’ll be busy constructing his own steel streetcar track, mapping his own limited and particular set of destinations, and the buoyant loop-the-loop of toddler movement will pare itself down to a few logical lines.

All us travelers in the dark

There is no more limply apologetic start to a blog post than I haven’t posted in ages, but. Indeed I have not.

For several weeks Flann’s sleep troubles kept me too disheartened to write. All I had in my head was the plaintive, boring whine Why won’t he sleep? and petulant responses to every bit of advice anyone offered me: Tried that. Doesn’t work. Tried that too. The kid was a tough nut.

His many, many months of poor sleep, the endless nights of repeated wakings and 4 AM reveilles, reached their nadir about three weeks ago, on a Sunday night. He woke up at 9:30 PM, after a bedtime of 8, and didn’t return to sleep until...4:30 AM. We brought him into bed. He wrassled, scrunched himself around, and, pathetically, clearly wanted to sleep. But he couldn’t. Time after time, he’d roll himself up into his favored pillbug sleeping posture, tunnel his face into the pillows, chew his binky, and blink expectantly, waiting for sleep to overtake him. But it didn’t come. The pattern repeated itself on subsequent nights: awake for hours, not wanting to be awake, often quite pissed about being awake, yet unable to sleep.

Matt and I traded off days of devastation; one night he’d be up with the boy, the next I’d be up. I called into work sick; he called into work sick. The flu came to visit in the midst of this, fortunately bypassing the boy and heading straight to us. (My version morphed into tonsillitis, then a raging sinus infection, and still hasn’t entirely departed.)

I started to frantically call the pediatrician’s office. Something is wrong; no baby sleeps so few hours a night; something must be wrong. But my pediatrician is on maternity leave, and her substitute is an RN with altogether too few stars on her Christmas tree. “There’s nothing I can do,” she informed me over and over again. “How about calling a private sleep consultant?” There are a couple of them in the Bay Area; they are, to put it mildly, costly. “I can’t afford a consultant, and I don’t think the problem is behavioral,” I said. “How about a sleep clinic? There must be one that focuses on children.”

She hemmed and hawed and finally allowed that she’d never heard of a children’s sleep clinic. Two seconds of Google revealed to me that the biggest fucking kids’ sleep clinic on the West Coast is fifteen minutes from her office. Nurse Numbnuts did not, of course, know how to get Flann a referral to it, so I abandoned her and went to his pulmonologist, who can refer to the clinic because many kids with breathing problems also have sleep problems. She whipped out a referral in ten minutes flat, and my faith in the functioning neurons of the medical establishment was restored.

In the meantime I whinged to my father about Flann’s troubles, and he granted me a paternal dispensation of cash to haul Flanny to a sleep consultant. Off we went to a rather splendid house in the Oakland hills—the sleep-deprived parents’ trade is evidently a lucrative one—where the kindly consultant observed Flanny upending Elmo dolls and chewing on crayons and attempting to break into her china buffet, and quizzed us both carefully about his temperament, his sleeping patterns, his daycare, his diet. At first I was a bit put off. “He’s of medium temperament, a bit shy, loves books and running around and knocking things over, and what could any of that have to do with his sleep?” Yet she was, in her tangential fashion, conducting quite a thorough assessment of the life and times of Young Master Flann.

Finally she teased out an associative thread. Flann took a binky at night, and for naps. He was fiercely attached to it. I had no plans to make him give it up; I thought he’d simply ditch it on his own in later toddlerhood, the way that most children do. He loved it. It made him happy. Why take it away? Well. Flann was in the bedroom with us since birth; we coslept until he was six months and then slowly transitioned him fulltime to his crib. When he’d wake, as a young infant, his binky would fall out, he’d cry, and we’d respond immediately because we were in the same room: pat him on the back, replace the binky and blankets. And off he’d go into sleep again. This happened perhaps once or twice a night. No big deal.

This pattern worked beautifully until he was a year old. He grew more aware. He got ear tubes, so his hearing improved. Once he was awake and we came to him, he couldn’t easily return to sleep, even though he was capable of plugging his binky back in by himself. Essentially, we were keeping him awake. How rude.

So, the consultant’s recommendations:

1. Earlier bedtime: 7 PM rather than 8 PM. Child has longterm sleep deprivation, needs to catch up on sleep, and probably has slightly higher cortisol levels as a result, which disrupt his sleeping hours.
2. No more binky. Break the associative chain “wake up ---> parents arrive ---> binky back in.”
3. We move out of the bedroom.
4. And yes. Cry it out.

She’s a Ferber rather than a Weissbluth devotee, instructing parents to check on crying kids at intervals rather than permitting them to cry indefinitely. She prescribed 15-minute checks. Tell the kid he’s all right and that he can go to sleep on his own. Remain calm. Don’t pick the kid up or take him out of the crib. So off we went, plan in hand.

The first two nights were dreadful. I still feel a bit shell-shocked. Crying at bedtime, lengthy crying fests in the middle of the night, the little boy sobbing hot exhausted tears into his crib pillow, pleading for “Bee! Bee!” and pointing at his mouth, wanting to get up and play, wanting to sleep but not knowing how. I was convinced the plan wouldn’t work. Too hard. Flann would never stop crying. I would never be able to stand the crying.

Fortunately Matt could stand the crying. On the third night he sent me off to sleep in the study at the back of the apartment, with earplugs. He slept in the living room, and dealt with each of the boy’s four lengthy wake-up-and-shriek sessions that night. He’s a much better night-time parent than I am. When I’m sleep-deprived, I’m grouchy and mean, and when Flann cries, I simply want it to stop. Matt’s calm and kind. And he believed the plan would work.

But on the fourth night: one waking. On the fifth night: no wakings. Eleven hours of sleep. He woke at 6; we took his sippy of milk into the bedroom and cuddled on the bed with him while he drank it. On the sixth night: twelve straight hours of sleep. I had to wake him for breakfast so I could get to the office on time. It seemed magical. I’d never really believed other parents’ stories of their sleep-training miracles; I’d been quietly stubbornly convinced that my baby was different, my baby could thwart any expert.

I’ve postponed the visit to the sleep clinic. Our subsequent nights have been mixed pickles: a few nights of hard bedtimes and midnight crying bouts; a few more nights of blissful uninterrupted calm. His top eyeteeth are almost through the gumline and are clearly causing him agida, but in general, I think the program has worked. For now, tentative hope. And an object lesson about my own negativity has been learned, I think.

Briefly

Both of us parental units have some major head-flu this week. Combined with the instigation of brand-new-and-improved Sleep Training on Friday, a method crafted under the aegis of a local sleep consultant of some renown whose hefty pricetag my dear father is picking up, this has been...well, quite a week. Picture Wiley E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff, ripping his drawers on a saguaro halfway down, and then plotzing nose-first into a packet of Acme dynamite. Also, the boy might be developing our flu. Also, I believe he has pink-eye. Did I mention the sleep training involves taking away his pacifier? Hoo boy and a box of Twinkies. Miraculously he remains spiffy and cheerful in the daytime. I would like to record my blurry memory of him waddling into daycare this morning, bringing his favorite teacher a damp fistful of crushed lilac (i.e., Yi-Yack!) blossoms he'd ripped off a shrub in passing, but I'm fading. I'll blog more when my cerebellum grows back.

Moon thoughts

There's a brilliant full moon in the spring sky tonight. I've taken Flanny out to see the moon—to point and exclaim Moo! moo! and then Stah! while gesturing at Orion, and Ar-puh! when he spots the green and red port-and-starboards of low-flying airliners—every night this month, but tonight I forgot. Dang. He's been dossing down early. An experiment upon whose results I am not yet ready to report.
———
He has many endearing habits these days. I want to record them before they change.

Mister Yes: He nods his head gravely in response to questions. Do you want to stop by the park on the way home from daycare? He pauses for consideration, then nods. Do you want yogurt? Do you want to get out of bed and see Daddy? Do you want to lie down with Cow (asked before midday naps, which he takes with face pressed into the stuffed Stanford mascot Matt brought him)? Pause, cogitation, thoughtful assent. Yes, madam, I believe I do.

Fartmeister: He announces Poo-poo! whenever any vaguely fartlike sound occurs in his vicinity. He says this to parents (ahem), to school friends, and today to a backfiring car. He looked carefully at the rear bumper as we passed, just to see what might emerge.

Soft face: This habit's been present for many months. When offered a new soft blanket, toy, or jacket, he places it on the floor and buries his face into it like a pillbug looking for refuge. It's incredibly sweet (and also a reliable sign that he's tired). And a source of guilty amusement when he carefully positions an item, face-plants into it, and misjudges his aim and bonks himself on the floor.

Funk boy: He dances. He dances a lot. Not quite sure how he acquired this trait, the only dancing his parents can do is the nervous up-and-down Sprockets white-kid hop of their late-80s youth, but there it is. Matt played him the Ghost World Bollywood outtake, the one with the crazed bouffanted line dancers in domino masks, and Flanny boogied frantically, then yelled More moh moh and signed the same. Must acquire more Bollywood. This morning, snuggled against me on the pillows, he heard a brief line of Parliament Funkadelic between NPR news segments and boogied, as best he could in a prone position, then demanded More moh moh and was most aggrieved that I couldn't produce it. I'll skip over his newfound obsession with "Elmo's Song." It's my fault. Damn YouTube.
———
Sunday, returning from Codornices Park—have I mentioned how much I love my town's kiddie parks? There are so many of them, and they're all so great, sunny and clean and full of toys. There are five good ones within walking distance of the house, and now that the interminable fucking winter monsoon has ended, we can visit them again.

Anyway. Sunday, we were on the vertiginously sloped part of Vine Street, heading home from the park, and we ran into a man walking with his family, an acquaintance with whom I've had a handful of conversations over the years. He was wrangling a recalcitrant preschooler while his pretty wife walked ahead with a slightly older girl whose pleased expression made it clear she'd precipitated whatever kerfuffle her brother was in. I stopped to talk with him and Flanny companionably offered the kids the rest of the Cheerios in his snack trap. We talked about the usual: the good weather; the spirited defiance of Berkeley's insane housing prices to global financial meltdown; the crowd density in the park we'd just left.

I walked away from the pedestrian conversation amazed, as I always am, at this man's resilience. He survived a horrible burn as a child, and he's blind and essentially has no face. And yet he seems happy, has kids and a wife and lots of friends, is a leader in the local lefty temple, and is a successful researcher. I cannot imagine how he's done it. Had a similar thing happened to me as a child—well, I'm not even sure I would have made it to adulthood. The burden of those scars would have overwhelmed me. And what happened to him was no accident—it was done to him. A stranger looked at his four-year-old face, all those decades ago, and threw acid into it. How do you overcome the rage that must follow such an event?

I asked a friend who knows him well. (I felt rather, well, voyeuristic, but I couldn't help myself.) His mother, my friend replied. Apparently he has this ferocious tiger of a mom who never let him fade into the shadows, who got him out there and got him every scrap of help she could and never let anyone treat him badly. It worked. He lived; he has a life. She gave him back, in a very real sense, the face that was stolen from him.

I can hardly bear to think about his story, especially when I look at Flanny's beautiful soft flower of a face, his huge blue eyes so alert and aware—and yet it's fascinating. He encountered both the very worst and the very best that the world can offer a child, the dark side and the bright side of the moon in one life. Children's strength is astonishing.