Essie’s word for bug is “bugah” or I suppose “bug-ah” but those two sounds blend together so seamlessly, and she so rarely says it once, that you really get bugahbugahbugahbugah. So that’s anything small and colored dark. Most things requiring a pincer grip. “What’s that?” we ask. “Bugahbugah. BUGAHBUGAHBUGAH.” comes her reply.
The other day Ess had poppyseed bread, a few tiny pieces of it. She was just convinced it was filled with bugahs. She ate it anyway. We should be excited about knowledge transference? We should be concerned about her willingness to eat things which she believes to contain hundreds of tiny bugs? Both? Parenting.
I’m walking through the mall, with Ess riding in the Björn, and her little left hand is holding mine. I realize she’s been holding my hand for five minutes straight. Her whale spout pony tail on the top of her head swishes back and forth as she looks around.
—
I’m lying on the kitchen floor when Ess walks over and, uncharacteristically, lies down next to me, resting her head in the crook of my elbow, and just stares into my eyes for thirty seconds. Satisfied with what she saw, or what she communicated, she gets up and toddles away.
—
It’s bedtime and dark. Ess finds her stuffed monkey as I pick her up and carry her to her room. She rests her head in the crook of my neck, and her tiny little cheek feels cool as she snuggles in. I pause in front of her crib, holding her, willing myself to somehow remember everything about this moment. I lay her down to sleep.
This post marks the beginning of a new theme here, one to which I’ve given little attention in the past, and one that, shamefully, I’ve only really begun to understand with the birth of Essie. It begins with a story…
We took Ess along to see Out on a Limb’s Nutcracker show at the Rosedale Mall. Mykala was occupied running the music, so Ess was my charge for the evening. Just the sight of her mama, without the ability to run over and get a hug was a challenge for Essie, so after feeding her, she and I began doing circuitous laps around the first level of the mall, biding our time, on each lap showing Ess the dancers while avoiding sightings of Mykala.
It was on one of these laps that Ess began going “booba booba booba” which I thought was a bit odd since (1) Ess only says that around Mykala and (2) Mykala was behind many storefronts about 300 yards away. Why was my 16-month-old daughter saying booba? I knew it wasn’t anybody in the area, so I began scanning shop fronts. You’ve probably guessed it already: mannequins. At Gap. Wearing sweaters. That’s how obnoxiously out of proportion these lady mannequins were: Ess perceived obvious, beat-you-over-the-head breasts on them through winter sweaters. As the father of a young daughter, this grated. What was worse was the men mannequins: you’re probably thinking they were overgrown steroid-adled gladiators, right? Wrong! They were, for all practical purposes, slim, humanly-proportioned individuals.
Sexism is awful. Double standards dump salt in the wound.
I’ve always been respectful of women to the point of obsequiousness, though that has been more an outgrowth of my personality than any true understanding of what it is like to be a woman. Recently, with the help of the Twitter stream of John Siracusa and, in turn, his following of Everyday Sexism, has the concept of what it is like to be a woman in the world begun to sink slowly into my thick head.
It probably began in earnest with my viewing of a video of a woman wearing a bog standard black t-shirt on the streets of New York, surreptitiously filming the amount of harassment a woman endures in public. Then a few more anecdotes expressing similar experiences. Slowly, slowly, these anecdotes strung together in my mind into a theme, a theme of outright and implicit verbal and physical abuse. Then, under the overwhelming weight of countless recollections and summaries of double standards, tacit gender norms, molestation by the male gaze, more double standards, violence, parking lots at night, walking in the city, walking anywhere, interviewing for jobs, keeping jobs, makeup, subtle sexism, overt sexism, snide comments, rude implications, the heartbreaking stereotypes endured by women bosses, OFFENSESDISMISSEDASJOKES, minimization, accusations deflected as overreaction, more parking lots, more city streets… well, this theme then became generalized into universal experience. It is not one type of woman that endures this hell: it is all women.
It was upon finally arriving at, and trying hard to empathize with, this shared female experience, that I felt like I finally began to understand being a woman in this world.
A seven foot white pine Christmas tree, grown at the Kroeger’s family tree farm from which you pick it up, freshly cut for you, baled, and drilled plumb for a tree stand is $59, which I believe is an excellent deal. We went to get ours yesterday and marveled at the difference a year makes with Essie. Last year, Ess was in the Björn, reacting a tiny bit to things, and generally kind of just along for the ride. This year she is 16 months old and far more interactive: riding on my back in the Kelty, reaching out at trees she likes, drinking sips of apple juice in the warming house, beaming at people she sees. The long-needled trees like our white pine feel soft to the hand, and, as with anything she feels that is thick and soft, Ess says “maoww”, meaning that it feels just like her cat at home.
I popped the tree into its stand as Mykala put Ess down for her nap. In years past, we would get the tree, put on the lights, put on the decorations, do it all at once in one marathon decoration session. This year, by necessity, we do a little Christmas at a time. Some decorations one day, the tree another, the lights today. We consider things like strands of lights without lead in them to be far more important than we ever did before. We take precautions against Ess knocking over the tree or drinking the tree water. It is a lot to think about, and that extra mental overhead, the thinking of someone else before you, is the next stage of Christmas we are growing into.
Mykala and I were talking a few days ago and we agreed that there’s a point where Christmas loses some of its highlight-of-the-year quality; sometime between high school and the end of college. Your peer group expands, you start interacting with the world differently, your mind and efforts are distracted by an entire other social sphere, even when you are home with family at Christmas. Your attention is divided. Then, out of school and into a job, before you have kids, and there’s this odd feeling of remembering how special Christmas was, but realizing it will never be that way for you again. For the first time, it is tinged with a little melancholy, if only a little. Then, as suddenly as something so profound can happen, you jump into the world of parenting and your attention turns to your little one, and your efforts become about making their Christmas the highlight of their year. It has been said and described by a thousand authors and observers, but you really do see the season through the freshness, the newness of your children’s eyes. It is something you read about, but a quite a bit more memorable and lovely to experience yourself. It makes the child-proofing of the Christmas decorations incidental, just a little speed bump on the way to your non-stop efforts to make the world a gentle, special, loving place for your children as long as you can.
It’s a sunny 42° outside and Mykala graciously extended what was already a long week of parenting through this morning so I could go workout at Lifetime. I came back and jumped into the unfolding morning: Marge had juice spilled on her and Mykala had already washed her; she was damp and drying. Ess had dismantled a few areas of the house, and was ready to play more. Mykala had to leave. With the cutest little repetition of “bye” you could possibly imagine, Essie wished Mykala well, and then it was the two of us.
I love how I can ask Ess to do things: put the magnet on the cabinet, let’s count the socks and then put them in the basket, those clothes are already dry so lets take them out of the dryer. Oh, and: don’t climb in the dryer, even though it looks fun.
Then, we came across a rogue pair of Dad socks, and Ess knew she wanted to put them in the dresser. She walked right over there with me, and I picked her up, and she dropped them right into the drawer. It is such fun to feel our communication developing. Ess can’t yet form sentences, but her cognition, understanding, and even sense of comic timing are remarkable.
Essie selected the still-damp Marge and a rabbit to take a nap with, and she drifted off after a few minutes of frustrated cries. She’s napping now as I write this in the sun of our dining room, sipping some coffee Mykala made and eating my morning oatmeal. “A Baroque Christmas” is playing in the background. I feel I will look back at this time, rough edges worn away by the retelling, with great fondness.
Currently sitting next to Mykala, listening to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in my headphones, finalizing the video transcoding additions I’ve made to the site. She’s watching a little light television, eating popcorn. Our first round of Christmas decorations is lending a soft light to the living room as candles flicker. George is waiting to eat some popcorn, sitting on the Christmas plaid wool blanket on the footstool. Essie is upstairs, sleeping soundly after an evening of joyfully running around. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow.
Called Mykala today over my lunch hour and the phone picked up, but instead of Mykala, I got: “bahbuhdee BAH… buhdee… Dada. DAHDAH.” My heart felt like it was going to melt.
To translate: Ess has a book that she reads with Nannie about hedgehogs, and they go to the playground. On one page the hedgehogs go swinging, they go back and forth. Nannie rocks Essie back and forth for this page, and Ess loves it so much that she has begun to do it on her own and when something, anything resembling a pendulum, is swinging, she says BAH buhdee. I’ll try to catch a video of it. Try.
So we tried a Facetime chat, and Ess went “MMMMWAH” on the phone screen, which, I mean c’mon… you can’t ask for a single thing more from life when that’s how your daughter is feeling.
Essie just started her own game of peek-a-boo with me; she is standing behind her highchair and peeking out at me with a huge smile. So so sweet. Some of her current abilities and habits to record right now:
Holding steady at 10 teeth. Upper molars pushing on gums but not present.
Language going faster than walking, but…
Just (and I do mean “just”, as I am writing this) stood up all on her own, took five steps forward, then gently sat down, and clapped for herself. Then, she stood up, and walked the length of our dining room table to a chair at the other end. First steps on September 12, and well on her way to walking on Halloween!
When asked what a frog says, Essie responds “bibbit, bibbit.” Cutest sounds we have ever heard.
Nodding “yes” and shaking her head “no.”
Chases the cat, saying “mao mao mao.” We asked her for months what the cat says, and she said “mao”. But, now when we ask how to say cat, she says “mao”. We’ve taken an adorable language misstep.
Essie recognizes mama and “dahd” in photos.
Showing her pictures of herself frequently elicits “babybabybabybaby”.
Loves to do things and bring things. We can ask her surprisingly complex sentences whose syntax we have not taught her at all, which she has apparently simply absorbed. So, “can you bring the boy with the hat to mama?” And she’ll go find her Little People boy with a hat, and bring her to Mykala.
Hats are “ats”. “Atatatat.”
Pumpkins are “puhnka”. She’ll find a picture of one in a book and I hear her going puhnkapuhnkapuhnka. But, what surprised me most, is she paged through the book to find a frog, and then sure enough I hear her going bibbitbibbitbibbit.
Does not love sitting on my lap while I play piano, but frequently wants to be picked up when I’m playing so I can get her something down from on top of the piano (where some of her toys and puzzles live). I don’t mind being a means to an end, but Mykala hears very few complete piano songs these days.
There’s more, but I’m going to go play “walk around” with Ess.