Variations on a theme

Did I say Edith was taken with Peter and the Wolf? It has become the soundtrack of our lives.

This morning I turned it on for her as usual after getting her dressed, then went back to my room to get dressed myself. A few minutes later Edith came running in.

"Duck caught buhd," she told me, trapping one of her hands in the other.

"The cat?" I asked. "He tried, but the bird flew up into the tree and escaped, right?"

Edith looked a little confused. She's still trying to make sense of the story. "Duck caught buhd," she repeated, again making the motion.

Again I suggested that the duck was in the pond, and the cat had tried to catch the bird but hadn't succeeded.

"Buhd caught duck," she tried this time.

"No," I said. "But who does catch the duck?"

Edith was silent.

"Who is going to come out of the woods and catch the duck?" When she still was unsure, I asked, "The wolf? Is the wolf going to come catch the duck?"

Again one hand trapped the other. "Woohf caught duck," she said confidently.

I nodded. "Yes."

And then, "Bismarck caught woohf."

***

February 27, 2007 -- Edith offers her first independent prayer. It was our grace at dinner last night. I began it:

"Dear God, Thank you for..."

Edith continued,

"Bismarck.
'now. [that white stuff outside]
Tomatoes.
Pastas.
Amen."

***

In addition to monitoring the food chain in czarist Russia this morning, Edith had work to do rousing her father. We had an extra wall calendar this year, featuring photos of baby animals in the wild, so I hung it near the floor in Edith's room. I thought she'd primarily enjoy the photographs, but back in January, Tom pointed to one square and explained that that was Mommy's birthday. I don't know what sense Edith made of the fact that a certain spot on the paper hanging on her wall was to be associated with her mother's a-doo-doo, but it stuck with her. Maybe she's wired like her mother to have strong space-sequence synesthesia, ordering days, weeks, and months in a clear mental spatial arrangement. At any rate, Edith wanted to know where other people's a-doo-doos belonged on the calendar. So we put a big red D on Daddy's in February, an M on her cousin Matthew's and a P on Uncle Peewee's in March, an A on cousin Abigail's and a T on Uncle Tim's in April, and an M on Mor-mor's in May...along with a big E for Edith's in the same month. This last is the most interesting, of course, and she now knows that while Mommy's a-doo-doo is on Polar Beah 10, Edith's a-doo-doo is on Little Beahs 5.

This morning, however, I told her we had arrived on Baby Monkey 28...or the big red D. Instantly she was alert.

"A-doo-doo, Daddy!" she called out to our bedroom, where Tom was trying to sleep in for his birthday. The mumbled response wasn't enough for her. She yelled it louder. Still unsatisfied with her father's level of enthusiasm, she snatched the calendar off the wall and ran into our bedroom to show him. Standing by the side of the bed and pointing urgently to the red D she explained, "A-DOO-DOO, Daddy! A-DOO-DOO!"

Tom later admitted he knew how she felt. As a child he'd always thought his parents were hopelessly laid back about their birthdays, too.

...it's not Prokofiev

A family story on Edith's Mor-mor recounts the time when, as a toddler, she responded to an adult who was trying to interest her in some pop music, "It's all right, but it's not Tchaikovsky."

Edith appears to be following in her Mor-mor's footsteps. I went ahead and purchased Peter and the Wolf last week, and she is taken with it. She went to bed listening to it several nights in a row before I realized that she had sorted out which themes went with which characters (for the most part--she's murky on the duck and the cat). Now she asks to listen to the album several times a day. She decided yesterday that she's frightened by the wolf, which she demonstrates by clenching her fists, voluntarily trembling, and announcing, "Edith scehhed woohf."

In a different musical vein, we took her to her first concert this past Saturday. Dan Zanes--rocker turned children's music star--was in town with his band, and we snagged three seats with my student pass. I had visions of Edith getting squirmy and fussy and everyone throwing us looks, so we opted for seats in the back on the aisle to facilitate a quick getaway. Then, figuring she'd be more likely to sit still if the songs were familiar to her, I got a Dan Zanes CD from the public library. (In browsing the children's music shelves I also picked up Presidential Campaign Songs, 1789-2000 and Lullabies from the Axis of Evil. It makes sense to me--but if Edith buys into the stereotypes out there, I expect she'll be confused. Are her parents patriotic? Anti-patriotic? Nationalists? Rebels? For us? Against us? It's something she'll have to work out for herself.) On the morning of the concert I told Edith several times that we were going to hear children's music in a big theater, and that we all needed to sit quietly and listen.

As it turned out, we needn't have worried about being singled out for bad behavior. For one thing, Edith was far from the youngest child there. For another, the whole theater was a writhing mass of toddlers dancing in the aisles, parents of the reluctant encouraging their toddlers to dance in the aisles, and parents of the really reluctant doing the dancing in the aisles on their toddlers' behalf. Children ran races up and down the aisles, cried, asked to go the bathroom. Parents greeted their friends, dried tears, took children to the bathroom. There was a father near us, probably a Wall Street exec, who when Dan Zanes sang a song about trains started organzing all the nearby children and parents into a conga line to go up and down the aisles, booming out his instructions about who was to put their hands on whose shoulders.

And through all this...Edith slept. When we first got to the theater she pointed out the drumset on stage. She stared surprised at Dan Zanes and company as they entered singing down the aisle right next to us. She watched them up onto stage and through the first number. And then she settled down in my lap and dozed off. None of the frolicking stirred her.

It's oddly conspicuous to be the parents of the only kid in the crowd who is sleeping. Every other adult there was in constructively-silly-and-upbeat, engage-your-toddler mode, clapping along, making all the requisite animal sounds, beaming these huge broad smiles as if it had been their life dream to see Dan Zanes in the flesh. But once your kid falls asleep, all that enthusiasm falls flat. It's so obviously a song and dance with your own kid as primary audience that animation without said audience feels like tap dancing in front of a blank wall. So we sat there stiff and quiet amidst the chaos, trying to pretend that we were still glad to be spending our Saturday at this fantastic concert, but secretly wondering who all these frenetic people were and whence they derived their joy.

Edith woke up during the last number. She rubbed her eyes and stared around her at the pandemonium for a few minutes before commenting, "Chu-dren's music." I'm pretty sure she was just recalling where she was. But it sounded rather like the classical enthusiast looking down her nose.

Which she can certainly do when she pleases, as witnessed last week at daycare--excuse me, the firehouse:

That kid talks funny

I've forgotten to mention an intriguing conversation we had last week at the dinner table.

"Ah-WAH!" Edith shouted, then giggled.

"What?" we asked.

"Ah-WAH!" she shouted again, laughing harder. Edith can crack herself up shouting nonsense words. So we kept eating.

"Zeke. Ah-WAH!" she shouted. And looked at us.

"Zeke. Wadduh. Ah-WAH!"

Suddenly I had a flash of inspiration. Zeke is a little boy in her class who was adopted from Guatemala.

"Does Zeke say 'agua' when he wants water?" I asked.

Edith beamed and nodded. "Zeke! Ah-WAH! Want wadduh."

I was fascinated that this had made an impression on Edith, enough so that she wanted to tell us about it. I wonder whether she recognized it as different from the other times that kids in her class shout nonsense words, none of which she has tried to tell us about. Maybe the fact that the teachers respond predictably to Zeke's agua but not to Edith's zzyzzy-zah has registered with her and made her curious about the power of Zeke's special word.

The converstion reminded me that unlike me or Tom, Edith could still learn a different language fluently if she started hearing it regularly right now. I think of her as a little English-thinking being in the making, but she could still be otherwise. In that respect her capacity for language is so much more exquisite than ours, though she sounds much more limited. It's strange to think that if our family moved to say, Hungary, Tom and I would still be hearing mostly nonsense syllables at the end of a year, whereas Edith could hear the same sounds we did and soon understand and communicate with the people around her in Hungarian. Wouldn't that be an amazing thing--to watch your baby learn things effortlessly from the same stimuli that had no effect on you?

"Be careful what you wish for"

How many times have we young parents heard that?

Everyone warns that you are dying for your baby to walk but that once she is mobile, you wonder why you were in a hurry to chase down an ambulatory little one. Eager as we were for Edith to take those independent first steps, I could imagine that these people had a point.

I had a harder time imagining that I'd agree with the same warnings about talking, though. You're dying for her to say your name, folks cautioned, and then you'll be sorry she ever learned it. That sounded a bit too cynical for sunny me (not to mention talkative me). Who wouldn't warm to her child's voice calling, "Mama"? Who wouldn't thrill to the funny little questions from a brain sorting out the world for the first time? Noting that many of the parents making this observation had kids in college, I suspected that they were speaking from a post-adolescence vantage point, thinking of the sarcasm they got from their sixteen year olds rather than the sweet appeals from their two year olds. If we ever regretted that Edith could talk, I thought, we had at least a decade or more until that day.

I need to take parenting advice more seriously.

Edith is newly stringing together sentences, but true to form, is still bent on engaging a participatory audience at all times. The result can be overwhelming. For the first time this week she uttered that childhood classic,

"Mommy, watch!"

Followed shortly thereafter by, "Watch, Mommy! Mommy, watch! Mommy, watch! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" We are now quite familiar with this phrase. In fact, Tom and I were listening for any sentence this evening that didn't start with either "Mommy" or "Daddy."

"Mommy, sit down right here!" is a favorite. "Mommy, do this!" and "Mommy help Edith!" are both in the running for a prize, too. But there are even the simple observations: "Mommy, Edith eating bread!" or "Mommy, Edith running fast!" or "Night night, Purple Beah. Mommy, Purple Beah night night!"

Or in her fastidious mode, "Mommy wearing Daddy's 'weater. Off, Mommy! Mommmy, off 'weater! Daddy's 'weater!" (I've heard this one frequently during the frigid weather this week, as Tom owns both of the two big wool sweaters in the house.) But I don't need to be wearing anyone else's clothes to hear "Mommy, coat off! Edith drink Mommy's mehk! Coat off, Mommy!"

There are other erstwhile wishes I'm reconsidering. I wanted Edith to love reading, and I wanted her to get to the point where picture books with a narrative appealed to her. But I confess her enthusiasm is outstripping mine. "Wead, Mommy! Wead, Mommy! 'Gain! One more! Just one! Wead, Daddy! 'Gain! Wead, Daddy! Daddy, wead! One! Just one!"

I was delighted with her appreciation for recorded music. It continues to make her willing to go to bed on her own. But it also has encouraged her to undertake a morning music appreciation class, too. Friday at 5am, nothing would do but for Mommy to sit with Edith in the rocking chair and listen to Glee Club recordings, while Edith pointed out any drum parts or parts where she thought she heard "Mommy ninging."

Can you tell it has been a tiring weekend?

So let me include a much sweeter instance of Edith's speech. Recently we've been making our prayers very simple, both at the table and at night, saying thanks for various immediate and obvious things around us. Edith folds her hands, but I didn't know how much she understood of what it was about. But the last half dozen times or so, we've been in the middle of naming things and she has reminded us, "Bismarck."

The night before we left for Iowa last month we took Bismarck to a kennel, the first time we've had to kennel him since getting married. It was a last-minute arrangement: A neighbor girl was going to look in on him twice a day for us, but when we got home from school that evening we discovered he had pooped all over Edith's room, the second time he'd done such a thing in a week. The first time we'd thought he was sick, but this time we started to suspect he was angry at us for something. Whatever the cause, we couldn't leave him home alone for four days, leaving a ten year old potentially to deal with another such mess. So we rushed around to find a kennel, get him in, take him over there...then clean Edith's floormat tile by stinking tile, while keeping her occupied and out of the way.

All of which was to say that I was more than a little irritated with Bismarck that evening. I was even wondering whether we had what it takes to make a happy home for a dog at this stage in our lives.

Before bed Edith wanted to know where Bismarck was. We explained that he had gone on vacation, but that we would see him again when we got home from Iowa. I didn't think anything more about it until we were curled up in the rocking chair nursing before bed. I was telling her good night, and that I loved her, a ritual usually met with contented silence. But that night Edith popped off and called into the darkness, "Night night, Bismarck! Love you."

It doesn't quite balance 17 daily readings of Corduroy. But it's close.

Snowbound Lovebug

Happy Valentine's Day! We spent the day together as a family, since they closed daycare and the seminary (though not the university) for ice and snow. The streets actually weren't all that bad during the day, but since we've had no other winter storms this year, everyone was itchy for A Big Event and rushed to turn this into one. I'm still waiting for a good deep soft snow, the kind in which Edie might be able to make snow angels or a snowman like the characters in her books.

Daddy's Lil Valentine (who has started doing fake smiles for the camera, alas)

"What'choo lookin' at?" asks Edith, afraid of getting too sentimental on the Day O' Love

Despite her come-hither sweatshirt, Edith demonstrates that her No means No

Up for a (play)date after all, Edith convinces Harrison to come check out the playground under snow. Note how well they'd do in a synchronized sliding competition.

Yup, still fun

Keeping up with the Joneses

Edith and I pulled up at a red light next to a car showroom this evening.

"Mommy! Cars! Indide!"

"I see them! Why do you think those cars are inside?"

Pause. Edith said something I didn't catch but that sounded perhaps like "duht."

"Dirt? You think they're inside to keep them clean?"

Silence.

"Well, maybe. I think the cars are in there just to show them off. They want to sell them to us."

"Yeah!"

"You want to buy a car?"

"Yeah."

"No, I think we already have a perfectly nice car, this car."

"Harry two cars."

Harrison's family does have two cars. I hadn't realized Edith was feeling humiliated by our lone station wagon. Poor kid--21 months old and already suffering the embarrassment of uncool parents.

Drumroll, please!

In an effort to ease the transition to bed recently, we've been putting on a tape of music when we finally leave Edith in her crib. This seems to make her willing to let us go. She may try a piteous last "Moah nong?" from her pillow, but when Mom or Dad says, "No more songs--I love you--goodnight," she'll hunker down to listen to the recorded music instead.

We have a few tapes on rotation, just the first several we grabbed from elsewhere in the house that seemed like they would do. Edith flatteringly refers to them all as "Mommy ninging." She has been especially taken with the Brahms Requiem lately. We had it on while playing in her room the other afternoon, and at the end of the sixth movement I pointed out the timpani to her--"Hear the drums, Edith?--and rolled my imaginary mallets whenever they sounded.

She liked that. " 'Gain," she asked when the movement was over and the much less impressive final movement had begun. So I rewound and we went through the bit with heavy timpani again. Then again.

Tonight she was full of vim at bedtime, but to my surprise, she asked to be put in her crib, wide awake, after about 30 minutes of singing. I turned on the Requiem and walked out. Since then she has been carrying on a little monologue in there about seemingly anything and everything:

"'winkle, 'winkle. up up of the world so high...Mommy ning...Pink Beah benket night night...Elmo: F! Q! X!" And then "Drum? Drum?"

I sure hope this self-appointed nighttime music appreciation session becomes the norm in lieu of crying. Maybe we'll get Peter and the Wolf from the library and see what she thinks of kettle drums.

As of this week our kid has two names, as she'll tell you: "Edif LLLank!" And as Sarah foretold, she's popping out now and then with, "Bye bye, Gechen..." or "Gechen do it..." I have to remind myself to correct her rather than egg her on--it's so cute in its incongruity.

She has cottoned on to one of my favorite picture books this week, too--Blueberries for Sal. I simplify the text as we go, because there are still a few too many words per page to hold her interest. But she gets the basic issue of the mixed-up mothers and children and seems intent on its being sorted out. And then, she likes blueberries.

All the same, isn't it funny how quickly even your own favorite books become tedious when requested regularly? I've been marveling at my poor adult patience, tired of a book after one read. Maybe a day later I could enjoy it again, but not a minute later (and then a minute after that reading, and a minute after that...)