Tag Archives: babies

Besieged by sleepy barbarians

There is a new epidemic in our house. We’re suffering a rash of little boys wanting to climb into bed with their parents at night. This pestilence results in tired, cranky parents, which was the primary reason for the fall of the Roman Empire.

I am not a proponent of children sleeping with their parents. Children do not know how to sleep in a civilized manner. They should be kept in their own beds, where the savagery of their slumber cannot infringe upon the sleep rights of the more peaceable members of the household.

If I do say so myself, I am a very organized sleeper. I rest in a straight line, perpendicular to the headboard. My legs stay straight and my arms are kept to myself. I don’t flail or kick at midnight apparitions. My unconscious discipline is absolutely Prussian. Periodically, my wife insists that I spread myself out a little so that I don’t so much resemble a man in a coffin. For some reason, she finds herself unnerved at sleeping next to a fellow resting in so much peace.

Kaiser models my pajamas

Once properly dressed in my pajamas, I’m ready for bed. Even in my dreams, the trains run on time.

She does what she can to enliven my repose. A woman of normal proportions by day, she sprouts six elbows and eight knees at night. Various combinations of these many joints can be found burrowed into my side in the dark hours. This strengthens our marriage by helping us stay connected.

There is no room in our bed for extra people, yet a bonus human can all too often be found there. It’s just a little human, but little humans use up a disproportionate acreage in the execution of their slow-motion, somnambulistic cartwheels.

The big boy’s methods are tried and true. He had a bad dream and seeks refuge in his parents’ bed. I wonder if his bad dream had anything do with a spastic creature sleeping diagonally across his bed and kneeing him in the midsection on the hour, because that’s what my bad dreams are about these days.

Practicing having fits

Photographic evidence that children belong to secret societies where they are trained how to toss their limbs in spasmodic fits. (Image: Frances B. Johnston)

The little boy doesn’t need an excuse. All he has to do is cry loud and long enough. Once he hits that pitch that sounds like he’s threatening to fling himself from the top rail of his crib, he’ll be taken in by Mommy and Daddy.

It would be unfair to accuse the little boy of sleeping diagonally. His layout is more nearly parallel to the headboard. Together, Mommy, Toddler, and Daddy form a big, sleepy H. This is unless Daddy falls over the edge, at which point the formation defies the western alphabet.

Little Boy only lays across the bed when he’s actually sleeping. When he decides not to sleep, he might situate himself anywhere. For example, he might sit next to Daddy’s head and punch Daddy in the ear just to inquire whether or not that gentleman is awake.

In the boy’s defense, it is often difficult to know if Daddy is awake, with all the flinching he does in his sleep lately.

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.

You kids can’t have nice things

I grew up in a big family. As one of the youngest, I lived under whatever reputation my older siblings had created for us, no matter how poorly I fit that reputation.

The reputation that became firmly attached to us was that of being destroyers of all things pleasant, carefully crafted, or well-intentioned. It didn’t matter that I cared for my toys and did not try to break things merely because broken was the natural state in our world. I was a cemented piece in the group, you kids, as in “You kids can’t have nice things.”

My only relief was the hope that when I grew up I could surround myself with things that were not broken and people who did not shake their heads at me with the sad knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

Fortunately, I was never able to afford the expensive sorts of nice things. The nice things I collected as a young adult were modest. My possessions were not impressive, but they were not broken either. Against all odds, I proved that I could have nice things.

For a while.

Then came children – two boys who love to use all the strength possessed by their little fingers to affect change. Everything they touch is altered by their hands. I’m learning to think of these objects not as broken, just different than they used to be.

Playing with cat and bus

Younger children sometimes labor under the misapprehension that upside-down is adequately broken. It is not. His big brother will teach him how to thoroughly break things.

At first, I tried to move things out of the reach of active, little hands. But there is only so much space up high. Some things must be left to take their chances. Consequently, I now have a fine collection of CD cases that don’t stay shut, filled with ripped paperwork and the wrong CDs, which are all scratched to hell. It’s a good thing only old people use such ancient media anymore.

The boys’ aunt gave us a German cuckoo clock. The clock is too beautiful for us. If we had any gratitude, we’d buy a better house to move the clock into. The boys, unused to seeing such fine things in our house, were overcome with the desire to handle it with their inquisitive, spasmodic hands. I quickly hung it high on the wall, much to their mutual disappointment.

Reaching for the cuckoo

A scene from the baby’s fantasy, in which he can reach the clock and straighten out that crazy bird once and for all.

Every hour, a bird shoots out of the clock to renew their disappointment. If only they could get their paws on that clock for two minutes, what happy boys they’d be.

Yesterday, I brought sleeping Little Brother in from the car as the clock struck one. The cuckoo popped out and did his thing. The boy woke and pointed at the clock. “Ooooh,” he said, before dropping back to sleep. For those not fluent in Babyish, “Ooooh” has many meanings, depending upon the context. Here, it means: “That bird is adequate. One day I’ll get up there to yank on him, and then he’ll be perfect.”

Don’t get the idea that I resent my children’s object-altering hands. I adore those four hands. I wasted years running away. Those hands have returned me to my roots.

I can’t have nice things.

I’m home.