Almost One

You and your six chins walked almost happily into Montessori today, and smiled and waved at me when I said my special goodbye ("quack quack quack I'll be right back"), and now I am around the corner trying to work and looking at pictures of you first. 

You are now able to: clap, climb the stairs spotted but unassisted, eat an apple or a pear, crawl around in the bed (uh oh), say "Momo" when you see the dog. You play next to a baby at Montessori and it is charming. Yesterday we had a babyfriend over and you had what I think was your first introvert meltdown. You are obssessed with the construction details on the top of your play teepee, in which we plan soon to place a toddler mattress to turn into a secret bed for you. I will miss sleeping with you, as you are warm and snuggly. I will probably be lax about you sneaking into our bed when you have a bad dream. I am soft. 

I am in the process of applying to 2s programs for you in New York for next year, which seems impossibly far off. We have applied early decision for you to another Montessori that is walking distance from our apartment. I am imagining a world where you and I stroll down in the morning, you play all day while I write nearby, and then we stop in Madison Square Park to play on our way home, or go up to meet your dad for early dinner. I imagine a world with a COVID vaccine and Joe Biden as president, and that your babyhood in quarantine will one day be a matter for family lore and nothing else, and not the new eternity. 

You are better at keeping your sneakers on. You like the baby swings, especially when I stop you at the top of your swing arc to bring you in for a kiss. I love kissing your baby cheeks. I see them and say "May I have a smooch?" and then I shower you with kisses. 

It's warm today, but the leaves are changing colors. Fall in New England. 

I have to plan the world's smallest socially distant first birthday party for you. I think we will serve carrot cupcakes and get you a balloon. 

I can't believe it's almost been a year. I feel like you just got here, and like I have always known you. My Succotash wish.

Crying in the Car

I'm in a spare, nearly empty antique office in downtown Beverly, five minutes away from you while you are enjoying your first day of Montessori. At least, I hope you are enjoying it. You were smiling and looking with curiosity at all the other kids and babies, and when we got to your classroom your favorite teacher Donna was waiting for you, and you reached out to her right away. I wrote down my cell number and kissed your cheek twice and waved bye bye with both hands and I made it all the way to the car before I started to cry.

I know it's good for you. I know it. You need to be with adults who aren't your father or Manamana or me. You need to be with other babies. They have a whole room set up just for you. It's time to start learning to nap not in my arms. But damn, am I a stereotype of a first time mother dropping her baby off at day care. 

I'm going to try to work today, so that I can at least point to a good reason why you are in a classroom with relative strangers instead of at home with me and your father. If everything goes perfectly I am to pick you up at noon, which is in two hours. If you are having a tough time they have promised to notify me. I can be there in five minutes.

Five minutes.

I love you so much it hurts. 

Do you know that? If you ever read this, then you will.

Words

 You are going through a mental leap right now, according to the know-it-all app that I have been using to try to divine what wonders are unfolding in that little baby mind of yours. And though some of the leap has taken physical form - all at once last week you started waving! And you continue to edge closer to walking unassisted - must curious is what I suspect is happening with your language.

You already had "mama" and "dada" and for awhile you've had "baba" (baby, I'm pretty sure) and "dodo" (which I am 90% sure means dog, as it is often said in response to the appearance of Milo). You had "up" but I haven't heard it in awhile, and also "uh oh," same. And I've been trying to do basic sign language with you, mostly "more" and "All done," but also "water" and "milk" and "nap." You mostly seem unimpressed with my attempts, preferring to ask for water by saying "UH UH" and gesturing to the cup with your chin. But then yesterday you and your grandmother and I were eating dinner at the picnic table outside. It was a mild summer night, and the nice part of eating outside is that you can make as much mess as you want and nobody minds. You were eating a simply staggering volume of pasta with cheese sauce, and you had it all over your face, and we were making silly laughing faces at each other and you were pulling me in for a wet sloppy kiss and I said "Oh I love you, yes, I love you I love you," and you said "AH uuvoo" and your grandmother gasped, so it wasn't just me, who heard it.

Then last night your dad and you and I were in the shower playing with shower toys and rinsing off the salt water from playing on the beach with some friends after our picnic in the afternoon. You love the handheld shower sprayer, and are the only baby we know who will reliably wash your own face. You were playing with your sprayer and we were talking about bellybuttons. You have a belly button, and mama has a belly button, and daddy has a belly button, and each time we would point and say "belly button," and then you said "ellehutton," and your dad gasped, and we asked each other "did he really just say that?"

It astonishes me, that we all learn to do these things, and eventually you will think nothing of walking across the room, or saying "bellybutton," and yet in the span of time I have kept this blog you have blinked into existence out of nothing. It's the closest thing to magic I have ever experienced.

Ten Months and Three Days

 Sweet Succotash! Or should I say Nermal. What a busy few days you have had. We celebrated your tenth month with a picnic on Old Burial Hill, in which you discovered picnic spoons and roamed among the headstones in striped overalls and a small bucket hat. At ten months and one day, the very day after your poor granddad returned to Florida, you took three unassisted quick little steps towards a rolling felt ball. You obligingly repeated the performance for your mother and her waiting cell phone, so I thank you for that. You have also begun to wave. You wave goodbye, and smile happily, and you wave hello on occasion. You are breaking through your top two incisors, which is giving you a tough time. One of them is through your gum, and one isn't quite. It's messing with your sleep, but you are handling it gamely. 

Your Manamana is here to help, but we are all realizing that there is more to helping with a nearly walking, practically toddler Succotash than any of us had perhaps anticipated. And so we have found a way for you to start going to a Montessori up in Beverly. I am trepidatious about it, but they have a plan for easing babies into it, and as I start to know your emergent character I come to think that you will really love it. You will have a whole room to roam and investigate and no one trying to keep you out of trouble. I think you will relish the freedom. And you so far have loved other babies. I know it will be good for you. And for us, as we will learn parenting things from their teachers who know babies better than we do, and we will also have time to do our actual jobs. But the first day they send me away is going to be tough. For me, if not for you.

Later this afternoon we will take you swimming in the baby pool, after a morning in which we all frolicked in the sprinkler. We are lucky to be here and not in NYC. No sprinklers or baby pools for us there. 

The world outside continues terrifying, but here at home, we have newly installed baby gates to keep you safe, and we have started to change your diaper on the floor, with you standing up. At moments I catch a glimpse of what your little boy face will look like, but you still have warm and rosy baby cheeks when you wake up in my arms from a nap, and I can still rain kisses on you. At least, for now. Still my baby. Though not for very much longer.

Coping

I cannot deal with these baby gates. They require some sort of mental fortitude to install that I do not, at this precise moment, possess, even though now is the time to put them up, as I have figured out where they should go, and you are occupied with our lovely neighbor who you love, and my in-laws are not arrived yet. And yet I opened one of them, unfolded the instructions, glazed over, panicked slightly, and fled into the kitchen to eat cheese.

I have noticed, incidentally, that you also like to eat cheese when you are out of sorts or upset. Typical.

I am whiplashed by how quickly you have changed in the past week. I fear that the age of playpens was brief and undistinguished. Now you want only to stagger around, holding onto my index fingers, groaning like something out of the zombie apocalypse as you stomp your baby feet after the poor long suffering dog. He's gotten good at staying just out of reach, watchful because that's his job, to watch over us, but without being in too much danger of losing a baby fistful of orange and white fur. The other day you yanked on one of his ears like a bell pull, as if you were a Gilded Age lady impatiently summoning her maid. Your father has obtained a sort of baby sledge for you, which is mean to be pushed around with enough resistance that it should help you walk, but you are mad at it right now. You don't want to push it. You want to learn about its wheels, which means tipping it over, which means it falling on your sweet baby foot, and that was unpleasant for everyone involved. You haven't forgiven the sledge yet for its audacity.

I, too, hold grudges against inanimate objects. It's why I don't want Nana and Grandpa's dining table.

Anyhoo. The baby gates. I haven't installed them. Presumably as the cheese gradually takes hold I will feel better about them in general. They look nice, they're sturdy, they will do what I ask them to do, so all that is good. Perhaps I will be ready for them tomorrow. We shall see.

Nermal

Oh my gosh, SUCCOTASH what am I going to do with you? In three days you have gone from baby to toddler. I didn't entirely understand how quickly that would happen. You now pull up and grasp onto objects and stagger around like a little drunkard and use your hands to cruise around the room. Crawling, you have decided, is for punks and sellouts. You are so excited about walking that you cannot sleep. Last night we spent two hours trying to get you down, and then you awoke what felt like every hour or so just overwrought. Very very Nermal-like (the world's cutest kitten). Right now you are playing at the neighbors and I have to measure doorways and tops of stairs to babyproof the bejeezus out of this house immediately. Good lord.

You also have learned that dropping things from your high chair is a fun game. Our new approach is to return things to you if they fall accidentally, but not if you throw them down and then give us an impish smile. You beast.

You are particularly invested in the footposts on our new bed upstairs. They are the perfect height for you to grasp and touch and inspect. You want to be carried less and stiff-arm me into putting you down, but if I put you down in your playpen your little face crumples and then I pick you up again. Then you stiff-arm me to be put down, because it is the floor that you want. The floor! To the floor, Mama!

I have sort of stopped calling you Succotash to your face, which makes me a little sad, but you have an organic nickname that seems to suit you, and which I catch myself using naturally in a way that Succotash was not. In any case, Succotash was my imaginary baby. And you are you.

You frustrate me when you are obviously tired and refusing to nap because you want to stand on the floor and investigate the bedposts. It's a tough balance, as I have learned that baby naps are important for parents too, not just babies. But in general you are still smiley and charming and the only person I want to see at six in the morning.

Now, to order those baby gates....

Nine Months

You are upstairs playing in our new shower with your father, and I hear you making contented "oohhh wahoow wahooow" sounds all the way down three flights of stairs, so I know that I have a minute to note down your state of affairs on this, your nine month birthday, official moment in which you have been outside my body for longer than you were inside it.

You have two teeth. But you are still a huge partisan of nursing, perhaps even moreso than in your tiny infancy. The other night while reading your favorite book, when we got to the part where the pigs say "LA LA LA," you said "LA LA LA" along with us. You are tall, and you stand by yourself, and I have seen you balance briefly and pass a block from one hand to another before having to hold on again. You will walk, I think, any minute. You have been observed to crawl, but you hate it. You love Milo, and your parents, and Callie, our neighbor who now watches you sometimes while waiting for her big banking job to begin.

You are almost a little boy.

But not quite.