About two years ago, before Max was born, we were at a friend’s baby’s first birthday. It was a wonderful poolside party with lots of kids. My wife remarked that almost every kid we met that day had a party trick. One little girl could dance like Mr. Bean. She was absolutely adorable.
Max knows almost no party tricks, but my wife did manage to teach him to clap when he’s happy. We had also taught him to wave earlier, but he rarely does it now that he’s learnt to clap.
Then, about a month ago, he started head-butting furniture wherever he went. That was a very painful week for us. It was like he was trying to teach himself some sort of Shaolin Iron Head Kungfu. I seriously considered getting him a helmet, or at least have him wear a hat throughout the day.
Luckily, as his motor skills developed, he stopped hitting furniture so much, and we could see what he was trying to do. It’s not easy to describe, but he does this forwards and backwards thing with his head and he goes “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” You can see him doing it on this video. We thought it looked like headbanging, so that’s what we called it.
Last weekend, we were at a full moon party and Max was the only toddler there, so naturally he was showing off his crawling and walking (with support) prowess to everyone. Then the thought came to my mind that he had a new party trick. So I said “Max, headbanging, Max. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” As always, he obliged.
One friend said, “That’s not headbanging. What have you been teaching him?” and gave me a dirty look. I wasn’t sure what he meant until later he was telling his wife “Max was going like this,” and started thrusting his hips suggestively. I thought he was having us on, but the next time we got the little guy to do the headbanging, I realized how he had to move his hips back and forth to keep his big head in balance, and what the whole movement would look like to some.
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While on the topic of words, I looked over my wife's shoulder while she was on a motherhood forum the other day. I couldn't make head or tail of what's being said. It seemed like every third word was an acronym.
My wife came up with this list to help me figure it out. It's a bit too much work for me, but I thought it might be useful to other readers.
EBM - Expressed breast milk
TBF - Total breast feeding
AF - Aunty Flo (Menstruation)
CD - Cycle Date
DC - Day Cycle
DPO - Day past Ovulation
EDD - Estimated Due Date
TTC - Trying To Conceive
O - Ovulation, ovulating
BBT - Body Basal Temperature
OPK - Ovulation P Kit
MS - Morning sickness
BD - Baby Dance (Make Love)
PCOS - Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
MC - Miscarriage
2WW - Two week wait (before testing, not always 2 weeks)
BFN - Big Fat Negative (pregnancy test)
BFP - Big Fat Positive (pregnancy test)
EWCM - (we're not sure yet, so will update later)
Post up if you find we've missed out anything. I'm quite sure there's many more.
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Don’t ask me if the baby has said his first word yet. The truth is - I don’t know. He might have. As you can imagine, we’ve been looking forward to the event with great excitement but it’s really not turning out as clear-cut as we had imagined. In our naivette, we always pictured he’d be babbling nonsense one day and then he’d say something crisp and clear and we’d all clap and rejoice and that would be the end of that.
Before the baby was born, a friend was telling us how her three-year-old girl was greeting everyone “Good morning” and “Good night” in Mandarin. It was difficult to believe but when we became parents, I think one of the first sounds our boy made (I don’t remember when, but he couldn’t have been more than six months old) was something like “Aaaaooowww” and we were jumping up and down with joy because the proud-parent babelfish in our ears translated that as “Hello”.
Months went by and, despite great efforts to recreate the conditions of that day, we didn’t manage to get another hello out of the baby, so that has been dismissed as a fluke. Since then, the baby has been making many new sounds and once in awhile, we get all excited because some of these sound like words in one language or another.
Here are a few suspects that spring to mind.
“Papapapapapa.” At first we thought he was calling Papa. Then we realized we never taught him to call me papa. As far as we can tell, it’s just gibberish.
“Weh weh weh weh weh.” Again, another of his first sounds. Doesn’t sound like anything but I thought I’d mention it since he said it very often at one point.
“Oooo. Oooo.” If I remember correctly, he says this when he’s pointing at things. This was still during his repeated-syllable stage but he’s gotten more sophisticated since.
“Ah jeh.” A few times he said this in response to me asking him “Okay?” I’m still not sure if he was responding to me, repeating my words or mocking me. We’re monitoring this one closely.
“Dahd Dih.” My wife is convinced he’s calling me daddy. I won’t say I’m 100% convinced, but I figured there’s no harm in me responding positively to it every time.
“Mahm Mah.” I tried to convince my wife he’s calling for her but she quickly realised he only says this when he’s upset. We now agree this is his way of saying “Help!” or “I’m not happy!”
“Caterpillar.” Okay, not really. I think it was something like “dadumeewa” or “ameneena”, or… you get the idea - correct number of syllables, vowels more or less right but consonants all over the place. We were all on the way home in the car and I was telling my wife I’d read him his favourite book (“The very hungry caterpillar” by Eric Carle but we just call it the caterpillar book) that night, and that’s when he said it. My wife kept going “Caterpillar! Max, caterpillar. Max, say Cat-ter-pil-lar” and surely enough, he said it again.
Since then, that word is mentioned a few dozen times each day in our house but not once by the baby. However, if you understand how new parents behave and appreciate the intricacies involved in forming four syllables with a little toothless mouth, you would not be surprised that my wife has made it official that caterpillar is our baby’s first word. Just don’t argue with her.
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It’s 2:25 am. I’m barely hanging on to my sanity.
My wife woke me up to scratch her foot. After about ten minutes of scratching, I decided to cure the cause of the symptom, so I thought I’d wipe her foot with a towel. I wet one corner of a bath towel. While I was rubbing her foot with it, she kept complaining about how I was doing it wrong and shouldn’t be cleaning her whole foot and only cleaning the itch. Then she moved on to how I was giving her a fungal infection by wetting her foot, so I moved on to dry her foot with the dry part of the towel but she insisted that the towel was wet so we had a big row about whether or not the towel was wet. I know, it was so stupid but that’s what we were fighting about. It’s wet. It’s dry. It’s wet. It’s dry. It feels wet. Come on! It’s dry.
I was screaming. She was using her victimised-Mickey Mouse voice. It wasn’t pretty. She wouldn’t let me dry her foot any further so I could tell her mind was set on being the victim and growing a whole new fungal community on her foot over the next few days to prove her point. Nothing I could do about that. Meanwhile, my screaming had woken up the baby. She fed him from the breast to put him back to sleep. I was afraid he wasn’t getting enough milk, but I can never mention that because she takes it as an insult to her womanhood, a challenge to her abilities as a mother, an affront to the long lineage of breastfeeding women in her family, and a slap-in-the-face to women in general. I just quietly made the baby some milk to feed him with. He’s been rejecting the milk bottle and formula milk recently and at the best of times would only drink it as he’s drifting off to sleep. I warmed the milk up and as I approached to feed him, my wife screamed.
“Don’t wake him up. What’s wrong with you? You’ve done enough damage already.”
In summary, I can't win.
Wasn’t going to actually post this, but then I thought what the heck, it's a good snapshot of my life at the moment. I'll look back and laugh at this, I think.
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June 11, 2008
Sorry for the lack of updates again. I’ve kind of lost track of where this blog was going. Like many blogs, this started out as a place to organise and file away complaints and maybe rationalise and justify the crummier feelings I have. Well, I’ve not run out of complaints just yet, but I did start caring about what people thought.
We just came back from a holiday in NZ, and it was wonderful and beautiful of course. But now I really feel very tired and it’s true what they say – you really do need a good rest after a vacation. I had this whole blog sort of written in my head about that, but it stayed in my head because I decided nobody likes the guy who whines about his vacation.
I thought about leaving out the vacation bit and just focusing about how tired I am but then it seemed hypocritical to expand that kind of effort on the topic, not to mention unmotivated and self-victimising.
I also had something about how we were turning into consumer automatons and how our material possessions were enslaving us. Not very original, I admit, but it really was something I felt passionate about. Then I thought about it a bit further and I could see how, to some folks, it might seem like we were bragging about what we had, or worse, just whining for no good reason.
I thought about writing down some of the dumb things that I’ve been saying or my wife has been saying but then I decided that was more reality than either of us could handle at this point.
Then, I was going to write about how my wife was considering spending more time with the baby and what this meant for us, but then I thought about how somebody from her workplace might read that and interpret it. So that entry went straight to the recycle bin.
I also had a few not very politically-correct things to say about parenthood but then I thought about how people would react and you know I’m really not feeling ready to tackle that ideological behemoth just yet.
So thanks for reading this, but I’ve really got nothing to say at the moment. Sorry. I’ll come up with something soon, hopefully. I’ll either find something to say that is meaningful to everyone or I’ll cut back on the caring and just lash out. I’m not sure which of the two will happen first, but I have a hunch.
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