Category Archives: Baby Trauma

If you can’t stand the heat, don’t install a molten lava floor in your kitchen

I cook most of the dinners at our house. There is something about the sight of me cooking dinner that makes our one-year-old especially needy. We make faces and giggle and play at all times of the day, but the only hour at which he consistently needs to be held by me is the one in which I am trying to cook dinner.

Given the choice of being held by me or by his mother, it is probably 70/30 in favor of Mommy, except when I am cooking. When I am cooking, he sees no other arms but mine. Only these arms can keep him from a crying fit when there is something sizzling on the stove.

Parents learn to do much with one hand. Our days are a routine of picking things up one at a time, in the order necessary to complete what would be thoughtless tasks to freewheeling, two-handed, childless types. Still, there are some things that are nearly impossible to do with a child in one arm, like hoisting a roast out of the crock pot or forming dough into a pizza shape.

My son doesn’t care what I can’t do one-handed. Cooking is daddy-toddler together time. He lets me know this by wrapping his arms around my legs as I’m trying to walk to get the butter. If I want to move freely between the fridge and the stove, I’d better pick him up.

Butterworth's demise

“Pick me up or Mrs. Butterworth gets it!”

By picking him up I’ve jumped from the frying pan onto the electric coil, because putting him down again is bound to be an ordeal. When a toddler is okay with being put down, he lets his feet down to meet the floor. When I try to put my son down so I can strain the pasta, he lifts up the landing gear like the floor is hot lava.

Touching hot lava dismays children, even when it is cool and made of linoleum. I am reminded of this every time I attempt to set a child down in it. Having to sit in hot lava while a heartless parent cuts up chicken breast is the worst fate imaginable. It makes a child cry. A lot. Much more than necessary. Especially since no crying is necessary. But it might distract Daddy enough to make him cut his finger, and that would teach him some respect for bonding time.

Cooling lava

A panoramic view of our kitchen floor after it has cooled down a bit from dinner time. (Image: Robert Bonine)

It’s not only that holding a child while cooking is inconvenient. There are things involved with cooking that are hotter than metaphorical lava. This means the boy has to be upset with me from across the room as I pull a dish out of the oven. But when safety is not an issue, I have learned to do all sorts of food prep with one hand.

If you wonder what this looks like, just imagine the Heisman trophy statue. Only, imagine a one-year-old tucked under the left arm, instead of a football. Then imagine that the outstretched right arm is holding a whisk.

To have loved and lost in the mall play area

It was a hot summer night, probably. Inside the mall, it was a static 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

A one-year-old boy was carried by his daddy. The boy pointed at the children’s play area, saying, “Uuuuuuh!” into his father’s ear at a volume equal to a toddler’s thrill of discovery.

At this time and place, and in the language of one-year-olds, “Uuuuuuh!” meant “Father, if it so pleases you, I would quite enjoy a visit to the enclosed area in which the children are kept.”

“You want to go to the play area?” the plodding father asked.

The boy pointed again and elaborated. “Üuuuuuh!”

“Üuuuuuh!” sounds different from “Uuuuuuh!” by virtue of its umlaut and the fact that it generally proclaimed more passionately. In this context, “Üuuuuuh!” meant “Yes, please.”

Inside the play area, the little boy crawled on the colorful carpet, navigating around squishy airplanes, trucks, and an incongruous, foam bank vault.

Money slide

A foam bank vault with a money slide. It’s not as fun once you figure out the money’s not real.

The boy was perfectly content picking up nasty germs from the communal carpet when she toddled into his life. She was one of those classy girls, who doesn’t show too much diaper. She had dark eyes to match her wavy hair. She wore a cute, flower pattern dress and pink socks.

He knew there was something special about her the moment she stepped on his hand. He wasn’t a very good walker yet, not like she was. Still, he proudly stood himself up, because the one thing he could do handsomely was balance, as long as he didn’t have to move his feet.

She showed him her best moves, taking three steps forward, and three steps back. The backward stuff was tricky though, and she toppled at the third step. She fell right down on her bottom, but she didn’t cry. He liked that about her, so he grinned at her with both dimples. She smiled back at him, showing off her chubby cheeks.

He’d been standing for a long time; rather than push his luck, he got down upon his knees. They crawled toward one another. She reached out for him, pressing her thumb against his nose. He giggled. She laughed too. It was a moment filled with potential.

Ah, what might have been!

Her parents collected her. Her father carried her out into the mall crowd. The boy watched them in stunned silence. He had to run after her, except he didn’t know how to run yet. He did what he could. He crawled. He crawled after her as fast as his two knees, and associated hands, could go. He crawled right out the entrance to the play land.

Five feet beyond the entrance, his daddy picked him up. The boy searched the distance over his father’s shoulder, reaching out his hand after her. “Aaaaaaaa!” he called out in desperation.

“Aaaaaaaa!” defies direct interpretation. It could mean “Pretty girl!” Perhaps it was a proper noun, like “Isabella!” Though worlds removed from Stanley Kowalski, the anguish in the boy’s voice made his plea sound most like the name: “Stella!”

The exact meaning is lost, and so was she – lost in the turning of the mall wing.

magic wheel

“Oh, play land wheel of fortune, tell me, will I ever see her again?”

The sad little boy was taken home, to be cheered by playing with his cat. When the cat ran away, the boy called after it: “Aaaaaaaa!”

We take our Stellas where we find them.

Baby’s first television theme song

Our one-year-old loves music. He’ll ride in the car and sing along to the radio in his baby way. You can’t understand any of what he’s saying, but you get the idea that he’s attempting to express himself musically. To my 45-year-old ears, that makes it a lot like Hip-Hop.

Music has been useful in soothing both of our children. When he was a baby, the big boy used to respond well to the soulful blues of Luther Allison. Somehow, my wife supplanted Luther with Robin Thicke this time around. I’m not thrilled at this development, but if it keeps the baby happy, so be it. The Wiggles will probably take precedence over everything in a few months anyway.

Babies are geniuses at mimicry. This explains why the baby loves to sing. I mentioned previously that we have a new cuckoo clock. They baby loves to mimic this too. He points at the clock and says, “Uh-oh, uh-oh,” which is not exactly “cuc-koo, cuc-koo,” but he has the inflection down perfectly. The baby’s impersonation is that of a cuckoo who has spilled his juice all over the carpet precisely at two o’clock. “Uh-oh, uh-oh!”

Uh-oh, uh-oh.

“Oh no, I spilled my juice! By the way, it’s two o’clock, if anybody cares.”

Mimicking simple sounds is standard fare for babies. When they put enough sounds together, it can blow your mind. The other day, the baby was sitting on the floor playing with some toy, or maybe it was a strand of cat fur – who can tell with babies? What mattered was that he was quiet and content.

I was working on the computer. From somewhere behind me came the soft melody of the theme to the 1960s Batman TV show. I turned very slowly as my mind ruled out possible sources of this music: the TV was off; the big boy and his mother were out; the cuckoo only knows two notes, and he was nailed to the wall in the other room anyway; and the cat can’t carry a tune to save his life.

I steeled myself to face a cheesy-TV-show-loving housebreaker, but there was no one there. There was no one except an unusually self-contented 14-month-old. The baby looked up at me and crooned, “Soba soba soba soba sot, YAN YAN!”

Okay, the vocals weren’t all that discernible, but he’s a child of his musical era. The melody was dead on.

Batman gets his goat

Just imagine how many evil-doing goats he’d be able to apprehend, now that he has a baby brother to sing his theme song.

His big brother likes to watch old Batman reruns on Saturday nights, so it’s not a mystery where he got the tune. The thing that blew my mind was that we had missed the last couple of Saturdays. It had been nearly three weeks since we’d heard that theme. The baby sat on those notes all that time so he could pull them out of his diaper weeks later and give Daddy a good shock.

Since then, we constantly goad him into singing the Batman theme for the amusement and amazement of our friends and acquaintances, because, to the best of our knowledge, that’s how parents are supposed to garner attention by exploiting the talents of their children.

Your jokes are stale and your nipples are useless

The baby has discovered separation anxiety – not at being separated from me – people all over the world rejoice daily that they are separated from me. The baby has developed a deep dislike for being separated from his mother. This includes separations of as little as a few feet.

Separation anxiety takes its toll on everyone. The mother is exhausted; everyone, except perhaps anxious babies and opossums, needs to be separated from everyone else for a little while every day. Otherwise, a fraying of the nerves sets in. This fraying is manifested in desperate pleas in the nature of: “Somebody please pull this baby’s tentacles off me!”

It is difficult for the father not to feel rejected. It’s as if the baby has contracted amnesia and has forgotten all the wonderful times we’ve shared. The baby and I have spent many good times on our own, from which we’ve built a certain bond. Suddenly, our games only inspire the baby to make that frown that says: “They say I used to like this show. I must have been very unsophisticated in my youth.” The frown is followed by the wail for Mommy: “Mommy, help! I’m trapped in the arms of a balding man who aspires to drollness and claims to be a relative.”

The baby is stressed out because he is living a nightmare where he can’t find Mommy and he is being stalked by a sad clown who thinks he’s a funny clown. And he can’t heckle me enough to make me stop.

Come to Daddy!

Who needs a tickle?

There are moments of light, in which the baby seems to recall that I am a loved one rather than a bad comic sent to annoy him. For a fleeting moment, he might coo sweetly to me. If I am extra lucky, he might even lean in and give me one of those kisses babies give, with their mouths wide open. If anyone but a baby kissed that way, it would be disgusting. In the next instant, the frown is back, as though I’m the one who gives disgusting type kisses. The wailing for Mommy is sure to follow.

I’m sure he’ll grow through this phase and retrieve his memory of me as a guy who did actually make him chuckle once or twice. Meanwhile, he’s Mommy’s ball and chain. If that sounds unsympathetic to you it only means that you have not been punched and kicked by him in his efforts to get away from you so he could crawl to Mommy.

“When will he reach that age when he only wants to be with you?” my wife asks me with a callow hopefulness. I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth: never. Even when his older brother spends the whole day eagerly lengthening the duration of my chores by helping me with them, he is always a single stern word away from running to Mommy. Mommy is the only one who can overrule Daddy. As such, she will always be needed.