The Scarf

It's been a while since I have written in this blog. Days of accomplishments and clever tidbits unrecorded, all because of my new obsession, knitting. As I type this I am wearing my new scarf, knitted for myself, by myself. I am almost as proud of this scarf as I am of Lucy. Unreasonably proud. It is lumpy and bright like a potholder from 1967. I have gotten several compliments on it, maybe because a) it is so noticeable that is demands attention -- to say nothing is to insult the scarf or b) I have been petting it a lot and smiling. Me (beaming): "Thanks, I knitted it myself." Yeah, you heard me, MYSELF.

I learned to knit on Saturday at a little lesson Mary Ellen arranged. Was funny to see eight youngish, smart, accomplished women hunched over needles and yarn, faces screwed into various expressions of concentration and consternation. Mackenzie actually referred to knitting as a sport.

Once I had a convincing rectangle, I found I couldn't stop. I knitted and the rectangle got longer. And longer still. With the exception of Lucy, so little that I do in my life has such a measurable and satisfying output (and unless you're counting diapers, ounces of breastmilk or loads of laundry, even Lucy isn't all that measurable). I wanted to say "Look! Look!" after every row. I whiled away two good hours of my life watching "The West Wing" marathon, finishing the scarf. There was laundry to be folded, a book to be read, home improvement projects to be done, and Portuguese to be learned (I like to ruin frivolous moments thinking of the edifying thing I should be doing instead of the thing I actually want to do). Still, I knitted.

I am not sure how far I will go with this whole knitting thing. Maybe I will stick with rectangles and fat, forgiving yarns and needles. I will be an unsophisticated but prolific knitter! Or maybe winter will wane and I won't want anything wooly anymore. But I have this one furry, yellow, orange, blue and green creation, proof of my new skill. If you see me and my scarf, please compliment me, even if you're lying.

Emerging from the Babble

Lucy speaks English. This morning Jason said to her, "Clap, Lucy!" — without clapping himself —  and she clapped. This thrilled me, and I kept squealing "Clap, clap, clap!" Which she did a few times, then got bored and started pushing her hippo around. The point is she demonstrated clear, independent understanding of a word. Unlike the time when she was four months old and I said "hi" and she sighed "hi" back. I talked out myself of the idea that she really was saying hi, not just making a noise, but for a long time I kind of believed it.

She has been recognizing word-object connections for a while now. She knows who "Mamama" and "Dadada" and "Clifford" are. She has crawled to her bookshelf when I asked where the books are. She gets very excited and lunges for me when asked if she wants milk. She knows who "Duck" is, but doesn't understand that "Duck" is not only her blanket, but also the rubber thing in the tub and the quacking creature from "Old MacDonald."

She has said some words, but like that initial "hi," they may just be sounds. She clearly says Mamamamama, Dadadadada, and mimics "duck," "dog" and "book" in little grunts. Despite the fact that she doesn't say many other English words, she is quite a talker. While she's playing or padding around the house, she babbles, practing her phenomes and prosody in involved conversations with her toys or the dogs. She likes to "read" out loud, pointing and turning the pages.

Beyond the language she has already demonstrated, who knows what else she understands. Now is clearly the time to quit cursing. I know from "This American Life" that the favorite swear word among the nursery school set is the f-word. I'd hate for Lucy's early verbal aptitude to be first demonstrated through the proper use of
f-ing as an adverb.

Family Albums

Thumbing through our brittle old family albums, I realize that we need to take more pictures — and take better care of the ones we have. I have been assembling some photos for my dad's upcoming 60th birthday party and have immersed myself in the sometimes blurry details of my family's past. There are photos of my mom and dad at fraternity formals, in the snow, around the house, with a brand new baby me. And in a few of them, they even seem to be in love (these people, now divorced some 25 years). I knew they were once in love, but I enjoyed seeing it for myself.

There are, of course, tons of photos of me. I can hear the flashbulb popping in my memories of moments both important and mundane. My mother, in her fanatically organized fashion, has my young life laid out in neat albums with dates and names. And looking now at this history, I am grateful she took the time to record it so well. Naturally, all Jason's and my own photos — at least up until we had something so important as Lucy to capture — are in boxes, early years piled on recent ones, Big Bend camping and what-was-her-name-again shuffled amid Florence and Madrid and New Year's Eve 1999. I am a faithful keeper of every memento, every scrap. I just lack the patience to catalog it all.

Currently, we have lots of pictures of Lucy and the people who love her. For now, it all exists neatly online. But how will Lucy thumb through albums the way I have lately? I know there will be a virtual equivalent of these faded albums, but it scares me that all this could go away if we forget to renew the domain name.

"School"

We prefer not to call it daycare. It sounds too much like my nightmares — Romanian orphanage lite. So we call it "school," which for me conjures images of babies sitting quietly at their desks, learning calculus. Well, she is not learning calculus at her sweet little "school" (I can't seem to stop putting quotes around it, even in speech), but it is a great place where we are happy for her to spend 22.5 hours a week.

The school (an "infant care center" is what they call themselves, but that sounds like a hospital to me) is affiliated with a Methodist church. It's in a little building that almost looks like a portable, except for the concrete foundation, casement windows and the fact that it's been there for about 30 years. From the outside, it's a pretty dingy place. Hell, even on the inside, it is not as sterile-looking as many of the other daycares I visited. It reminds me of the church nursery I attended when I was little: the earnest smells of cleaning products and diaper cream, the sounds of baby chatter and tinkling toys, cheery reminders about washing hands and bringing supplies.

The best part of "school" is her teachers in the Bunny Room: an older Bangladeshi couple who have worked there for more than 12 years. Rokeya has a master's degree in early childhood from a university in Bangladesh. She is tiny and keen, with a musical voice and a very diplomatic way of telling you how you're doing things wrong. I am uncertain about the actual credentials of Monsur, her husband, but he can always be found in the rocking chair or on the floor virtually covered in babies. Either he doesn't speak all that much English, or he is more comfortable using singsong babytalk. But the babies LOVE him. Lucy has a duck blankie (the all-important transitional object that, when used in combination with the thumb, helps her manage almost any situation), and Monsur always asks her, "Where is Duck? Where is Magic Duck?" She grins and waves Duck at him.

At school, she has learned to wave and clap and mimic the hand motions to "Itsy Bitsy Spider." She goes on buggy rides — you should see Monsur pushing around the open-air bus full of babies. And every day, she gets a report card that tells us how much she slept, ate and pooped, as well as a brief paragraph about her activities and mood, written in Rokeya's elegant hand, which I hear in her musical accent: "Enjoyed listening xylophone music."

When I first started taking her to school, I thought my heart would break from her crying. Now, after a little more than two months, my heart breaks from her nonchalance — she joins the baby mosh pit without so much as a backward glance.

Miss Personality

For a while there, I worried that Lucy was shy. With strangers, she would cry and climb up my shoulder like she was trying to hide inside me. I knew this was normal separation/stranger anxiety, but I kept thinking, "What if she's shy? No kid of ours can be shy." It's not that I hate shy people, it's just that I always assume they hate me. Of course, everyone MUST like me, so I when I meet someone shy, I shift into social overdrive — a noisy, prattling gear that often has the opposite of its desired effect. So maybe the person starts out as merely shy, but in the end, indeed hates me. I am not shy. Jason is not shy. If Lucy is going to have a trait that neither of us possesses, couldn't it be tall?

I am relieved to report that she is not shy. I knew this for sure when she was flirting with a man on the plane home from El Paso yesterday. She kept climbing up to peek between the seats, grinning with all four teeth at some mustached stranger, reaching for his hand. If you're a stranger or relatively unknown to her, the trick to earning her affection is to ignore her. While she does get overwhelmed by throngs of adoring family, she manages to win friends in restaurants, at church, on planes, wherever she encounters seemingly disinterested people. Apparently she, like her mother, wants people to like her.

Even under the family love barrage this Christmas season, she stayed pretty social. She enjoyed tugging on mustaches (her future taste in men?), pulling off glasses, playing peekaboo, eating the sundry sweets and other inappropriate foods they gave her. All in all, she was charming and everybody liked her, which was a great relief to us. But what I will eventually have to accept is, outgoing or shy, liberal or conservative, we have a limited amount of control over what she likes, who she likes and how she is. Part of our bodies, yet still her own person, even at nine and a half months old. She hasn't even hit puberty, and I already feel the pangs of her breaking away. At least she isn't shy, or doesn't hate me — yet.

A Major Christmas

Christmas is just more fun with little kids around. Even though Lucy hasn't a clue who Santa is, and was just as entertained by cookie tins and carpet lint as she was by her presents, having her at Majorworld made it feel more like Christmas to me. And I think everybody else liked having her there too. Her loot: lots of noisy bright toys, including a toy laptop computer, various darling outfits (even a camoflauge dress), and many books. Not a bad haul for someone who couldn't even write out her own list yet.

Lucy or no, Christmas at the Majors' is always fun. We eat and drink and laugh a lot. We play games, watch movies, and get in the hot tub or the lake or the occasional good-natured argument. Bill and Patsy's house was built to entertain large groups of people, and sleep almost as many (depending on how you feel about spending the night on an air mattress), and they are about the best hosts you could ask for.

This year, we played Liar's Dice and Pictionary (as opposed to the usual Chicken Foot and Spades). Taylor was the big winner at Liar's Dice, which was funny given that it is essentially a drinking/gambling game and she is only 13 (not that she was misbehaving in any way, just kicking our butts). Pictionary was fun until the part where Jason got the word "vibrate," and naturally, he chose to illustrate something far too...obvious, which I proceeded to guess correctly. In front of my extended family. That embarrasing moment was topped Christmas day by my spilling a full glass of red wine on Patsy's lovely pale carpet. She said, as we all furiously scrubbed the dark splash with hydrogen peroxide, "I usually don't serve red wine, except to family." And we all agreed that we were the exact people who shouldn't be allowed to drink red, and I in particular was made to drink white for the remainder. But I still think they will invite us back.

Lucy enjoyed playing with wrapping paper, crawling around on the floor and banging on the coffee tables. And she had no shortage of relatives to hold her and feed her sugar cookies. She even ate her own Christmas dinner made up largely of casseroles, which, as it turns out, make perfect baby food. She had a big time, even if she'll never remember it. Luckily, this will likely be the best-documented Christmas of her life.

Peek-a-boo and tricks that stop working

One thing I have definitely noticed is that the same old tricks stop working eventually. And trust me, I am the expert on one-trick ponies. You're talking to the guy that has told the same jokes over and over again since he was 12. With Lucy there are some instances where the object of the game seems to be "distract me before I ruin your _________ (insert day, outfit, shoes, furniture, reputation, etc)."

Take diaper changing for instance. This involves keeping her face-up while you rapidly try to wipe and change. And as our little Mary Lou learns to twist and tumble, she seems to think that the counter-top is the pommel horse. In the past a simple rubber ducky would hold her attention long enough to make the change. Ah, those were the salad days, huh? We now resort to a quick Greco-Roman wrestling match and hope no one comes away with a prize. The incredible thing is that she already moves so much faster than we do. What worked yesterday probably won't tomorrow. I’m afraid I’m not original enough to keep up. But I’m not worried. That’s what TV is for. And besides, I've got the whole "got yer nose!" bit ready, just in case.

Embarrassingly Happy

This morning, Jason and Lucy danced around the house to Christmas music, still in their pajamas. I had been awake for a couple of hours with Lu — reading, banging cups together and pointing at the Christmas tree while she smiled and laughed. So by the time Jason got up, I was feeling pretty proud of us. And then their dancing started, and I sat at the counter like a fool, crying about how much I loved them. Not that it takes so much to make me cry anymore, but happiness is rarely the cause.

It's so embarrassing to admit — and maybe sad that I should be embarrassed by it. Yet watching Jason and Lucy dance around, I had the chance to alight on my life and witness something perfect: a taut bubble of sweetness that I wanted to grab and hold. Maybe it was just the fact that the house was clean. Could joy have just been buried under a few piles of laundry? Have I just been too busy to notice how good things are? But in that moment, against a tidy backdrop, the pedestrian worries and mundane shoulds fell away, and I was still. Feeling the perfection of my life. THIS, I thought, this is the exact corny feeling that people write songs about at Christmas.

Making the Baby Stupid

In my mind, the world is divided among:
--People who have their televisions in the living room (Inferior People)
--People who have their TVs tucked discreetly away in a sometimes/special-occasion place (Superior People)
--People who (gasp) don't own televisions (Exceptional People...with Whom I Would Have Almost Nothing to Discuss).

I like to blame Jason for the fact that we are Inferior People, but it is doutbful that I would be sitting around reading Baudelaire in the original French even if he didn't want to watch the Simpsons. While I have accepted this about us, I want more for Lucy. I want her to be an Exceptional Person, a charming, modest genius who blithely says, between sips of her non-alcoholic beverage, "Oh, it's a television show? I don't have a TV." But not in the annoying way people often say that.

And yet, Lu lives at our house, the home of Inferior People (at least one of whom feels really bad about it). She already has a favorite show, one aimed expressly at her: "Teletubbies." It's a sweet but bizarre British public TV program about childlike alien creatures. They hug and squeak and run around a lot, and they're ruled by this eery sun-god with a baby's face. Lucy is mesmerized by this show -- she claps and squeals like she's hearing her own lost language.

It both delights and horrifies me how much she enjoys the Teletubbies. I think, it's on PBS, how can it be evil? Does it really matter if we say goodbye to Baudelaire in French before she can even speak English?

Mushy Foods

Lucy is the baby goat I always wanted. We have been playing this game called "Will She Eat That?" Mostly, she will. Today: unfrosted Christmas cookies at Aunt Pie's house and sweet potatoes cooked for her by me, her mother. Cooking food for Lu makes me feel earthy and frugal. Tonight I cooked carrots and mushed them up with the hand blender. They are delicious and plain. I hope I did not ruin her taste for them by feeding her cookies.

She is nine months and one day old. This is my first post, so I won't list all nine months of accomplishments, but the highlights include smiling, laughing, rolling over, sucking her thumb (really, her most important accomplishment, as thumbsucking is central to her good attitude), sleeping through the night, crawling, pulling up, pulling the baby monitor off the wall, cutting two absurd little fangs as her first teeth, clapping, waving, pointing, bouncing up and down, sort of singing, babbling, razzing, starting "school," making three trips to El Paso, and generally being fabulous.

So, are you bored with this blog yet?