One of the fundamental joys of parenthood is dressing your kid funny. Stripes and plaid together! Wheee!
Tag Archives: Jackson
Sunday night we took the Nut out to dinner
Sunday night we took the Nut out to dinner at Aldo’s. Apparently, every parent of a child under eighteen months said “Fuck it” and packed up the car to go out that night, because the normally pleasant and quiet downtown was packed with strollers and diaper bags. (I do not recommend the salmon with DIJON-MINT sauce, it is not a pleasant or even necessary combination of tastes. I also recommend, if you’re taking a one-year-old out to dinner, to bring a banana or some Veggie Booty to keep them quiet because they’ll hate whatever you order them from the children’s menu and you’ll spend the rest of your meal either dining alone or standing out on the sidewalk with a fussy baby while your spouse finishes all the wine.)
Anyway, one of the waiters also has a one-year-old child, a girl, who, he says, has a vocabulary of forty-two words. For those of you who aren’t up on the developmental milestones, forty-two words at one year is somewhat FREAKISH. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve been working with the Nut for five months trying to get him to learn sign language, which was supposed to give him a sign-language vocabulary of fantastic breadth by the time he turned one, and the only thing close to a sign he ever does is dig wax out of his ear. Not that my child is in any way developmentally disadvantaged — OH, NO — and not that I’m jealous of the waiter/bartender’s little genius, or that she’ll have all sorts of emotional problems because in six months she’ll be crawling out of her crib to go sell crack out of her diaper down on Haley Street for dictionary money — OH, NO. I’m saying that forty-two words at one year is somewhat freakish simply because the waiter/bartender seemed to take A LITTLE TOO MUCH PRIDE in his language prodigy, and people who are not appropriately humble about gifts they could have had no control over bestowing on their children get a fat kick in the nuts from the rest of us non-prodigy-producers.
Because I will talk all I want about babies and no one can stop me!
Bwaa-ha-ha-ha!
Jackson’s Latest Tricks, or, The Little Scientist’s Latest Experiments
Flushing the toilet. Oooh, this is good. He’s about ten minutes away from putting stuff into the toilet to watch it go down, I can see the little hamster wheel in his brain working overtime on this one.
Dropping food off of his high chair tray. Total tot entertainment. He takes a big handful of glop (e.g., cottage cheese) and holds it out over our Home Depot “Oriental” carpet, but before he drops it he makes sure I’m looking (if I’m not, usually he’ll just give up and keep eating). I made the mistake of laughing at this once, so forget it.
Faking me out. This is when he pretends to drop glop off his tray, when actually he has quickly stuffed it into his mouth first and is holding out an empty fist so that I will think he has glop in it and get all ready to catch it. Then he opens his empty hand and smiles at me, and I say, “You faked me out!”
Climbing down from the bed. After watching Kitty leap down off the bed a few times, I guess he figured that was the coolest way to do it (since the actual human examples set by Jack and I are not nearly so aerodynamic). One morning he launched himself off the bed and landed on his throat. (Where was I? Umm, well . . .) So now he crawls carefully to the edge of the bed, grabs hold of the quilt, swings his legs down, and crawls off. How did he come up with that? Fuck if I know.
Erasing my posts. No longer allowed near the computer when I’m typing.
Unplugging stuff. Like the computer, while I’m typing, which successfully skirts the effects of being banished from keyboard and mouse proximity. He also likes to unplug the vacuum cleaner while I’m vacuuming, which is downright hilarious.
Dialing random telephone numbers. *Sigh*
Threatening to walk. This morning he took two unassisted steps, right in front of me, so stay tuned, all hell is about to break loose. Plus, I might win some ice cream!
Ante up
We are taking bets on the exact day Jackson will start walking. Actually, I have taken a bet with myself and written it in my usually-quite-empty day planner — July 15. If I win I will take myself out for ice cream. Jack doesn’t seem interested in betting; he’s not into performance pressure, or whatever you call it when men can’t get . . . up and go get their own beer, so they ask you to do it, since you’re already standing in front of the refrigerator wondering who’s going to make dinner. Unlike your not-quite-toddling son, who gets around faster by crawling, who needs both hands for crawling — he could carry an open beer in his mouth like a dog, I suppose.
(And he’ll have a sip of yours).
Two Firsts
One: Jackson can now suck on his own toes, and two: he got his first CD liner notes “thank you” (a first for me, too) on Alastair Green’s latest effort, “A Little Wiser.” Alastair is a Berklee-trained rock guitar god who is currently living down the street in a cute little trailer in his dad’s driveway. His site is now up and running.
Faking It
I am no longer faking an interest in Shakespeare. Jack has been wanting to watch some version of Hamlet for months now and every time we go to the video store and he presents the box to me, I just give him this weary sigh and he puts it back on the shelf. I was trying to work up the spit to do it, I really was, but the other day he said, “You’re not going to ever watch another Shakespeare movie, are you?” I think it was in John Osbourne’s play “Look Back In Anger” where one character says, “Who’s your favorite writer?” and the other guy says, “Shakespeare” and the first guy says, “No one’s favorite writer is Shakespeare!”
I started thinking about this because of something a midwife told me when Jackson was just a few weeks old: “The more you smile at him, the more he’ll smile back.” So I spent a couple of months trying to smile at him all the time, and it was working, I guess, until the other day when I looked at him and he gave me this totally strained, fake little smile and I thought, “Oh my god, I’ve turned him into Regis Philbin!” I realized that it’s far more important to be engaged with him (and with everyone) like a real, live human being — happy, sad, or with butter coming out of my ears — than it is to pretend everything’s jolly until the day he realizes that I’m a complete and utter nincompoop.
When Parenting Resembles Pro Wrestling
How Jackson Got His Many Names
Babies spit up two kinds of milk: one that’s still fresh, and one that’s been in the stomach long enough to look like cottage cheese. As soon as we learned this, Jack and I began saying, “I’ve been cheesed!” when the baby spit up on us. As cheese went from noun to adjective to verb in our house, all sorts of phrases sprung up, such as “Don’t jiggle Jackson too much or he’ll cheese you!” and “You’re looking particularly cheesy this evening” and “Hand me that cloth, I have to decheesify someone here.” And of course it led to an evolving series of nicknames for the baby (Mr. Cheese, Monsieur Fromage, Signor Formaggio) leading to the current favorite: Senor Queso.
His other nickname is The Nut, which stems from the beginning of my pregnancy when I started consulting a little growth chart to see how much the fetus weighed each week. Somewhere around 9 weeks I determined that s/he was as big as a peanut, so that’s what Jack and I started calling the little beast (handy when we were still debating names). For a long time s/he was going to be named Pablo Ali (or Kate), but serious dissension from Jack’s mom led us to settle on Jackson.
Five Months
Today is Jackson’s five-month birthday, so we celebrated by sleeping in until 6:30 and then watching Sesame Street with a cappuccino. Actually, I had the cappuccino while Jackson chewed on the remote.
I am happy to report that it IS okay to eat something that’s been in the refrigerator for nine days, but you might not actually enjoy it. I had exactly two bites of some aged osso buco and then threw it out. Which reminds me of the time I had dinner down on Chrystie Street at Sammy’s Roumanian Restaurant with Mark and Bill. This is the place where they put syrup containers full of chicken fat on the table. So I order veal and the waiter says, Oh, I thought you’d be too liberal to order the veal.
Chinese Lantern
There’s a quote from Lincoln Steffens, “I have seen the future and it works.” He said it after a visit to Russia in 1919. Steffens’ enthusiasm for the Soviet form of government did not last, however, and by the time he wrote his memoirs ten years later he was disillusioned with communism.
Anyway, I was walking around in the back yard this morning, a nice thing to do around 8:30 when my son gets fussy but isn’t quite convinced that it’s time to take a nap, and I noticed this big bush with little red flowers hanging off of it. It looked like fuschia that hadn’t quite bloomed yet, and I was reminded of a line from a poem by James Merrill. I went to see him read in a community center in Connecticut about fifteen years ago. He was a dapper man and very eloquent, and he read one poem (I haven’t been able to find it, but I’m still looking) and he gets to this line where he describes someone looking out at a garden and the person says, “I have seen the fuschia, and it works.”
I e-mailed my landlady (who lives right downstairs, I love e-mailing people who are, like, ten feet away) and she said she thought the bush was Chinese lantern.
