44

 I'm waiting by the door for you to come home from school, which has become my habit since the fall. I don't always know that I am doing it, but then I find myself skulking around there, peering out the door looking for the car.

We have a new SUV, which you think we got for you because it is a big red truck (your very favorite), but which we actually got for you so it was easier to get you in and out, and will be easier to carry grandparents and your expanding array of stuff as you get bigger and bigger and bigger. Today I am 44 years old. This day last year we were freshly hiding out in a pandemic and also you ate your very first avocado puree. The pictures of you show you smiling, covered in green goo, and then trying to share it with Milo. You are still my little baby. Now you are almost a boy, and you run and play and investigate and take things apart and continue to stubbornly refuse to speak only in zombie grunts even though we can tell that you understand virtually everything that is said to you. I have to watch myself and try to stop swearing so much. Mama cusses like a sailor, Succotash.

My parents arrive next week, and they will be seeing you for the first time since we left Texas last March, and fled straight into pandemic. There's a scene in the 1993 film Jurassic Park - a classic now - in which a girl and her brother are in an SUV that's attacked by a Tyrannasaurus, and their car gets flung into a tree, and then they have to escape the SUV and it starts to fall down the tree after them, and they have to climb quickly and with focus down the tree to escape, and it's just one thing after another after another and when the girl finally gets out of the tree and is safe on the ground she throws her head back and screams at the top of her lungs. I remarked to your dad that I suspect I will do something similar, when I get the vaccine finally, whenever that should be, after coping with my head down and keeping you safe and growing and cared for and doing my job after this year is over.

Basketball

 Whose kid even are you? A couple of weeks ago we were at the playground in Salem Common and you spent an inordinate amount of time watching some dude shoot hoops. I didn't think that much of it at the time.

Then last week at school your teachers reported that you found a baby-sized basketball in the gross motor room and spent the morning tossing it through some rings that hang from the ceiling. And you loved the basketball so much that you took it back to your mat to nap with it.

They sent a picture as proof.

When we told this story to Manamana and Grandpa Greg, they got so excited that they overnighted you a Little Tikes plastic basketball hoop and ball set - precisely the sort of object I pledged never to own - which is at the moment erected in the study where I can see it from my desk. YOU LOVE IT. We have raised the net just enough that you can tip the ball into it from your baby hands, and you spent the weekend practicing throwing the ball up to reach it. You've gotten pretty close too. You harangue any adult within finger-grabbing distance to throw the ball in the hoop for you to watch. And then, this weekend, your dad and you and I were playing with it in the kitchen and you made like you were going to pass me the ball but then you didn't. You actually faked me out, Succotash. You're not even one and a half. This is troubling on so many levels.

Today you brought your home basketball to school to show everyone. Grandpa Greg has it all worked out that you will play point guard for Harvard for all four years and then decide not to go pro but instead to do graduate work in Roman architectural history before going on to med school. So. No pressure. 

Your father and I are now wondering if this is going to be a passing mania that is over in two weeks, or if it is a harbinger of years of sitting in bleachers. I guess time will tell. 

Seventeen Months and one day

 Have I written about your obsession with umbrellas yet? We have a cabinet in the dining room, a built in meant to hold dishes, and we have ceded the lower portion of it to you for your entertainment during mealtimes. In this cabinet we keep a few board books, a stuffed wooly mammoth that I got on a trip to Spain like six years ago, some bells, several rolled up placemats, and, crucially, like six different folding umbrellas.

You love umbrellas.

I think you love how they change shape, and you love the different bright colors. You love to hide underneath them, or behind them, or sit in them like they're a boat, or make a sort of barricade out of three or four of them. You like to open the blue one, and then the plaid one, and then the one with smiley faces that we don't know where it came from, and have me hold one and your dad hold another while you hide under a third. Your favorite item to cuddle while riding in the car is the hot pink one with the duck-head shaped handle. You have gnawed off some of the paint off the duck bill, which is probably not great for you, but hopefully it won't have any lasting effects. I have seen you drift off to sleep in your car seat, one baby hand resting lovingly on the duck umbrella.

You still aren't in your language explosion yet, but I feel like it must be coming any day now. 

Right now you are at school, and I am missing you. 

And that is where things stand, one month before you turn one and a half.

Child Labor

Your very new most favorite activity is washing the dishes. Well, sort of. It's standing on your new toddler kitchen helper tower thing at the kitchen sink and playing with the water, filling cups, pouring cups out, filling salad bowls, dumping salad bowls down yourself, and then eating dinner in wet sweatpants and no shirt.

That's not fair - you are actually getting quite good at keeping the water in the sink while you play. But given that we are still on a two showers a day schedule - instituted when your poor baby nose had chronic sinusitis and the steam was the only thing that would really help - and all you do in the shower is play with water and the sprayer and cups of various sizes and with different holes in them - your dad and I are very amused that you can't get enough sink time. As a corollary to this newfound enthusiasm you have also been introduced to mopping. You are a fan. It's no vacuuming, but it's close. 

This morning as we readied for Montessori you lobbied to play in the sink, but instead settled for watching me make you a cream cheese and mango-peach jelly sandwich while toying with a measuring spoon. I told you you could take your measuring spoon to school to show everyone if you wanted to. You were very stoked at this, keeping tight hold of it as I pulled on your sweatshirt and socks and sneakers, and when we put on your coat as I bundled you out of the car. When we got to your classroom you held up your measuring spoon in triumph, and Miss Paula asked if you wanted to go show it to Miss Kerrie. You dashed into the room, going UH UH UH and brandishing your measuring spoon, eager to share your discovery with everyone.

Still not a lot of talking, but I have lost count of all the words you can understand and identify in pictures. You've got all the words in the "101 first words" book your grandmother sent, and then a whole bunch more besides. You are usually able to make yourself understood with gestures and points and grunts and sign language. When we read the word "mittens" in Goodnight Moon you sweetly touch the tips of your index fingers together and then look at me to see if I saw. 

I did.