The canon

Two years, 1 month, 23 days: Edith’s first exposure to one of her mother’s triumvirate of cherished childhood books, Anne of Green Gables.

We often start the day by reading. Edith’s books are arranged in her bookcase by difficulty level: board books on the bottom shelf, picture books in the middle, novels and other books for older kids on the top shelf, along with those books too fragile for rough handling. We aren’t actively stocking the top shelf yet: almost all the books there were inheritances from her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

Edith spends most of her time picking from the middle shelf these days, with frequent forays back to the bottom. Yesterday morning, however, she went over to her bookcase and announced, “I want to read grown-up book” and promptly pulled my childhood copy of Anne of Green Gables off the shelf. Fortunately it is a hardcover illustrated edition. She sat in my lap and talked with me about each of the colored pictures, as I tried to tell her the little vignette behind each one. She seemed intrigued.

This morning, she returned to the shelf and again announced, “I want to read grown-up book. Where Anne?” She couldn’t find it in the place it had been the day before, and I didn’t immediately see it either. “What about this one?” I countered, pulling out Charlotte’s Web. She studied the cover for a moment, uncertain. “Or this one?” I asked, pulling out Black Beauty. “Horsie!” she exclaimed with pleasure. But then she spied Anne at the far end of the shelf and grabbed it.

Trying to get a grip on all three books she told me, “First read this one (Anne), then first read this one (Charlotte’s Web), then this one (Black Beauty).” She climbed into my lap. “Where Anne and Diana?” she asked, flipping busily through the pages of her first choice looking for a picture.

All of the books are beautifully illustrated and held her attention for a good amount of time. Charlotte’s Web is so filled with images—colorized in this edition, I confess—that I could tell most of the basic outline of the story from the pictures alone. We got as far as Charlotte’s eating the fly before Edith lost interest. In Black Beauty I was a little shakier, not knowing the narrative very well. But she didn’t get much beyond Beauty’s friendship with little Merrylegs, so I was okay.

Anne would be pleased to have Edith as a bosom friend. “What color is Anne’s hair?” I asked her before we put away that book. There is a picture of Anne on the cover that for me will always be what she looks like—much paler, taller, thinner, and more dreamy than Megan Follows. But Edith refused to answer. I thought maybe she didn’t recognize the braids emerging from Anne’s hat as her hair. I opened to other pictures and pointed. Still, she was silent. “I’n know what color Anne’s hair,” she insisted. Then, finally, she made her pronouncement: “Black.”

A kindred spirit, indeed.

P.S. How crazy to look from this post back to this one a mere ten months ago.

Sequiturs

Despite my mention of Edith's recent surrealistic conversations, we're also surprised by the more comprehensible connections she's making these days. Her ear has gotten sharp, such that she can pull words out of an adult conversation conducted without any of the exaggerated cadences or grammatical simplifications that are used in speech directed toward a toddler. Some of the types of connections she has made recently:

(1) Tom and I were talking about the fact that our friend Campbell recently landed an interview for an academic position in Australia. Edith chimed in to ask what we were talking about, and I told her that we were talking about the possibility that Harrison would move to Australia.

"Harrison move to Australia?" she asked. "Like Alexander?"

In case you're rusty on your picture books: In Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, a great book that Edith first encountered at Becca's house in Boston earlier this month, the title character threatens to move to Australia periodically throughout his awful day.

Then Edith looked worried. "Harry feeling grumpy?" she asked.

(2) Tom and I were discussing Uncle Peter's adventurous trek across China to reach the park in Siberia where he is working this summer. Edith piped up, "Mommy talking about China? Like in Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late?"

In that book, the pigeon is coming up with every excuse under the sun for not going to bed. One line in his volley of protests: "It's the middle of the day in China!"

(3) At yesterday's softball game I was trying to distract Edith from begging for mommy milk by urging her to watch Daddy at bat. Then his hit was caught deep in right field.

"Oh, man!" I said.

"Oh, man?" she asked.

"Oh, man. Daddy's hit was caught. Can you say 'oh, man'?"

"Oh, man!" Edith repeated. "That team can never fail. When the sons of Eli break through the line."

Best friends

Christine Lavin has a song, the title of which I forget, about babysitting a friend's child and being overwhelmed with happiness and gratitude when the little girl affectionately tells her at bedtime, "Today was the best day of my whole entire life." Proud of her babysitting prowess, she reports the comment to the parents when they come home, only to have them laugh and respond, "Katie says the same thing every day." I don't remember the rest of the song, but I do recall that Christine Lavin doesn't allow for the fact that Katie might be telling the truth: Maybe her life is a string of wonderful days, every one better than the one before.

Edith's friends stand to experience a similar letdown these days if they, too, understand superlatives like an adult rather than like a two year old. The day before Father's Day, Edith came out with, "Daddy's my best friend," thrilling both her parents with that sweet and well-timed pronouncement. But a few days later it was "Mommy, you my best friend." Then in the car this weekend, "Santiago my best friend," followed quickly by "Harry my best friend."

We're going to allow for the possibility that Edith is not being either mercurial, ingratiating or calculating but that perhaps, in the world of a two year old, there is no limit to the number of best friends one can have.

Edith sends Uncle Peewee off to Siberia for the summer with a tickle and a joke
(uh, just like the Communists used to do...)

Father's Day
(If it looks too Hallmark to be believed, know that it actually wasn't posed)

Edith and cousin Santiago share a moment of contentment after a long day of playing

Edith and neighbor Annabeth head home from the pool

We've got spirit, yes we do...

Edith's latest song requests are college alma maters and fight songs. From the backseat she pipes up,

"Uncle Peewee's song?"

I sing "Old Nassau."

Later at lunch she says, "Tawnehl."

"What?" I ask. Edith's neurons are random firing like crazy these days, making her thoughts hard to follow.

"Tawnehl," she says again. She begins to sing, "Mumble mumble yuga's waters, and waves blue..."

"Oh! Cornell!" I say. "Yes. That's Daddy's school. What's Mommy's school?"

"Bulldog."

I laugh. "Bulldog is the mascot."

"Bulldog makes mess?" she mishears me.

"No, bulldog is the mascot."

"Bulldog makes mess," she repeats. "Mommy, who clean up the bulldog's mess?"

Later, "Mommy, want to sing 'Bulldog'? 'Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow..."

And then, in a classic instance of random firing, "Mommy, cut my hangnail?" I proceed to cut the offending nail. Midcut Edith sings, "...the seasons come, the seasons go, earth green, white snow..."

And one afternoon, "Mommy, what my school song?"

Time to refer her back here.

Update

Thank you so much to all the friends and family who have emailed, called, posted, and otherwise sent good wishes this week on Project Wean. We're touched by everyone's interest and grateful for the support. I apologize here for not responding to everyone's thoughtfulness individually, but I decided that I would keep Edith company in her difficult task. If she could learn to forego the comfort of mommy milk all day, with only an early morning and a late night nursing session (more on that decision in a minute), then I could wean myself from checking my various forms of electronic communication more than twice a day, too. So I'm online just once before work and once in the evening, and that necessarily makes for more abbreviated communication (though hopefully increased dissertating).

I didn't want to jinx the weaning project by posting an update before we had established a new routine. But we're five days in now, and it has gone far better than we had reason to hope, to our great joy. Edith has not nursed during the day once since Sunday. There are easier days and harder days, but she has not thrown herself from the balcony, and she is not sitting keening in front of a wall. I think she's going to be fine.

On Sunday afternoon, when it was becoming clear what "all done with mommy milk" might really mean, she spent half an hour circling the park with Tom sobbing, "But I want my mommy milk!" while I sat a little ways out of sight. It was plain sorrow, not an angry tantrum. But once she got through that stretch, we realized that we could, in fact, hold the line against unwanted nursing. And confident about that, I decided that I would be fine keeping two scheduled nursing sessions a day: first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. So no one has to get up at 5:30, and I still get to nurse my little girl at the hour that she's most likely to be cuddly about it. After she has been brave all day, the bedtime nurse becomes a sweet reward.

It's ideal for now. Getting rid of all the public nursing, the incessant nursing, and the unpredictable nursing is already a huge change. And once we get to the point when she's no longer wheedling and whining to nurse, and when she also (hopefully) develops more coping mechanisms that don't involve my body, all the bad parts of nursing will be over for me. I'm happy to nurse twice a day at set times for the forseeable future.

In the short term, the tendency to act out all her feelings physically on mommy has increased, which I half-expected. Edith's emotions are close to the surface as she works through all this, and I can often tell how she's feeling based on whether I'm being caressed or harassed. She plays with my belly button more than ever. She struggles not to pinch and bite, sometimes unsuccessfully. She also hugs and kisses more than before, crawls into my lap and asks to be held in a baby position, and pokes her head under my shirt and announces that she's a baby inside my belly again. Verbally she goes from telling us proudly, "I be all done with mommy milk!" one moment to pleading, "Mommy, I want your milk!" or simply, "I NOT a big girl!" two minutes later. Sometimes she reverts to baby talk.

In general, these episodes pass fairly quickly, though. I think it has been an enormous help that we're doing this while she is home with Tom full-time, taking a daycare vacation for the month between his spring and summer semesters. Normally, right after daycare is when she's most strung out and desperate to nurse. But with our current set-up, not only is her day less stressful, but Tom is able to give her a pep talk about being brave, then fill her hands with snacks right before I show up, so that she is better emotionally equipped to handle that moment.

All things considered, I'm feeling a little sheepish about all the pre-weaning drama and indeed, that I didn't take the bull by the horns and start nursing on a schedule a year ago. Thanks to Leigh for sending along the posts about breastfeeding the demanding toddler from her mothers' listserve; some posters suggest that continuing on-demand nursing into the second year is ill-advised and that a mother can pro-actively replace on-demand feeding with scheduled feeding after a year. (Where was that advice when I needed it?) Otherwise, you stand to create a mess, putting no restrictions on this one behavior while starting to teach limits and rules about everything else. The kid tends to exploit the activity that seems ungoverned by rules, sensing it's the one place she has mom over a barrel. It sounds so obvious. How could I have unwittingly become that undisciplined parent whose kid runs riot over her?

So that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where we're cracking the whip from here on out. (Ha.) Has anyone seen the cartoon in this week's New Yorker, p. 78? It shows a baby sitting on the psychiatrist's couch; the psychiatrist is saying, "All righty, then--enough about breasts."

I think I'm going to laminate it.

Confucius say...

A conversation between Daddy and Edith in the car.

E: Where we going, Daddy?

T: We're going to a church where I preach sometimes.

E: Daddy, you pleach sometimes?

T: Yes.

E: You pleach sometimes, Daddy?

T: Yes.

E: Sometimes Daddy pleach. And sometimes Bismarck eat grass.

Cold Turkey for the (Lovable) Leech

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but I've discovered a gap in the parenting advice market. Somewhere between The Contented Little Baby Book of Weaning and Super Baby Food is missing How to Wean a Nursing Addict. Which, if all goes according to plan at our house, might be the subtitle of a book titled like this post.

If you are a mother who has chosen to breastfeed her child, apparently you either intend to wean him or her before a year of age, like the majority of American mothers today, or you intend to let the child call the shots the whole way. Breastfeeding past one year is usually called "extended breastfeeding." Depending on whether the parenting book you are reading endorses or condemns this choice, you will find that it is either the path of an enlightened, compassionate mother who is giving her child all the best nutritive and emotional benefits by allowing the child to self-wean at age 3, 5, or even 7--as all these books remind you, it never lasts forever and as soon as it's over, you'll be wistful for this fleeting time in your life--or you are a hippie freak lacking discipline and impervious to good advice.

Nevertheless, tucked away toward the end of both kind of books, there is usually the brief section titled something like "In the Unlikely Event That You Want to Take the Reins and Actively Initiate Weaning in the Toddler Years, Here's How to Do It." In the pro-extended-breastfeeding literature, this section is inevitably prefaced by sorrowful reminders that breastfeeding is a precious relationship, that it means a great deal to your toddler's emotional health, and that it is unfortunate that you feel circumstances have brought you to this point. To wit, the type of guilt-tripping with which the breastfeeding literature abounds, all in the name of encouragement. By way of supporting your implicitly-understood desire to continue breastfeeding if only the Wrongheaded Public out there weren't talking you out of it, the author reminds you that nursing a toddler is a different experience than nursing an infant: the toddler nurses only a handful of times a day, and only for a few minutes at a time. She is open to reasonable discussions about nursing and can be made to understand that it only happens at home, or at certain times. She can be taught a code word for nursing that other people don't understand and can be readily distracted by alternative activities when it's not a good time. In the anti-extended-breastfeeding books, by contrast, the section on mother-initiated toddler weaning usually warns that this is going to be a pain in the ass, because you skipped the window where weaning your docile little baby would have been easy, and now you're in for it.

For all that the latter kind of book says it's going to be hard, in either case the section then goes on to give exactly the same advice: First adopt a don't offer-don't refuse policy, not offering your child nursing sessions for which he doesn't ask. Then begin to cut out one feeding at a time, slowly, a feeding every several days. This is for both your own physical comfort and the child's well-being. Cut the easiest feedings first; save those the child likes most for last. After two weeks or so, you will have cut them all out. Provide lots of extra hugs and cuddles during this time to make up for the withdrawal of the comfort that nursing provides. Then proceed apace with a diet now 100% from the supermarket. Voila.

This advice, as optimistic as it is unvarying, makes no sense to me. The idea of set feedings is unknown in our house. Edith nurses upwards of 10 or 12 times a day on the days that I am home with her, 6 or 8 times a day on daycare days. She nurses at the drop of a hat, inside, outside, because she's intimated by a new setting, because she's bored with the same-old same-old, because she's hungry, because she's tired, because she's upset, because she's happy and cuddly. She always nurses first thing in the morning, last thing at night if I'm the one putting her to bed, and immediately upon my arrival home from work. These particular sessions last 30 to 90 minutes. The rest is scattershot. I don't know when the on-demand feedings recommended in infancy were supposed to morph into a set and abbreviated nursing schedule, but we missed that moment.

Don't offer-don't refuse? For Pete's sake, who's offering? Nursing is at Edith's request. It is a poking, clawing, pinching, climbing, wheedling, yelling, crying, back-arching request when she is denied. And more often than not, a poking, clawing, pinching, climbing, wheedling, yelling, crying, back-arching request when we try to distract her with yummy snacks, fun toys, favorite books, or a proposed special outing.

Extra hugs and cuddles? I have scratches across my abdomen and a scabbed-over belly button from all the "cuddles" Edith gives me while nursing. When she is definitively denied, she lies on the floor sobbing and doesn't want to be touched. "Edith doesn't love Mommy anymore," she told me on one such occasion last week.

Missed the docile baby window? Edith was every bit as avid and determined a nurser at twelve months. She just couldn't pinch as hard then.

Wistful for this fleeting time when it's gone? Yes, wistful for the days some time after nursing ceased being painful around ten weeks and before it started being a wrestling match in the second year. Wistful for the moment every other day or so when Edith lies calmly while nursing and I have my sweet girl in my arms looking up at me, rather than standing, walking, switching sides every minute or two, climbing my shoulders, sticking her fingers in my mouth, or kicking at my face. Wistful for the easy conscience of the mother who hasn't "denied her baby" due to selfish desires of her own.

What I'm most wistful for at this point, however, is some bodily autonomy. A day when no one claws at me or pokes me in the belly button.

A day when my husband can cuddle up to me in the evening in the confidence that I won't plead off being touched by anyone else today.

A day when I don't have to embarrass our friends and neighbors by making them pretend they didn't hear the strident request, "I want my mommy milk!" and don't notice that I've hauled a toddler into my lap and am hitching up my shirt in public.

***

So, having scoured the sources for advice on weaning toddlers that reflects the nature of our nursing relationship and come up short, we are embarking on our own plan. This Sunday will be Cold-Turkey Weaning Day. The gradual phase-out just doesn't seem to make sense in this case. We have been talking up the big day to Edith. She is excited that we will have cake to celebrate All Done with Mommy Milk Day (that sounded better than No More Mommy Milk Day). But I suspect that she doesn't understand the rest. In fact, given the way our conversations have gone, I think she's expecting that there will be some particular nursing session that will end in cake, rather than that cake will signal the end of nursing for all time.

Tom and I know there will be significant changes in our family routine that will need to accompany this change:

(1) Edith still gets a great many of her calories from nursing. We will have to be much more on top of providing nutritious snacks all day long, toddler-style, and serving meals on a very regular schedule.

(2) Edith usually wakes up between 5 and 6 am, whereupon I bring her into our bed to nurse for 60 to 90 minutes. Tom and I realize that if she's not going to nurse during that time, one of us is going to have to get up with her instead. Which means going to bed earlier in the evening, cutting short our precious adult evening time.

(3) Knowing that this will be a struggle at first, we are going to have to be prepared to leave social events where Edith is preparing to tantrum unless milk is forthcoming. Which may mean lots of gearing up to go places that we wind up leaving in less time than it took to get there.

(4) Blissfully casual about what I've ingested for the past two years given the metabolic demands of producing milk, I know that I'm likely in for a hormonal thud, which even if it is not mood-altering will preclude unregulated caloric intake any longer.

So think of us all on Sunday and beyond. If this works out, I may have a marketable book for the parenting advice section.

Beantown, Part Three

VII. The babes of summer

Tuesday dawned much fairer than Monday, and we wound up making it a low-key, toddler-oriented day in Arlington with Jenn and Toby. Jenn and several friends have talked romantically in the past about raising our kids together on a commune somewhere in rural New York State--we imagine a free-ranging outdoor life for the kids and figure we have enough experts in different fields among the adults to give them a well-rounded education. Every now and then, when New Jersey malls and traffic are getting us down, Tom and I will start planning for the commune again.

But six days actually living with the friends in question made it seem even more attractive. As we'd also found in the Poconos with Harrison's family, it's wonderful to have intelligent, sympathetic adult friends of your own around while you're doing all the labor-intensive, ultimately-rewarding-but-also-often-quite-humdrum stuff that it takes to care for a young child day-to-day. There's something immensely cheering about not being isolated in one's own apartment with a little person who, however much her conversational ability may be increasing, essentially maxes out at a running commentary on directly observable phenomena in the immediate surroundings--and who can't put on her own socks, get her own cup of water, or even pee without one's intensive assistance. (In the middle of the previous sentence, for example, I was called to Edith's bedroom because she'd wiggled out from under her covers and wanted them back on top of her, something she can't manage yet.) But doing all the childcare in the company of good friends made me ready to buy the commune lands tomorrow.

Children on the commune would be expected to start contributing to the community's well-being at an early age. Toby and Edith spent a good 15-20 minutes this morning making us pancakes. Actually, I was amazed that they stumbled on an activity that kept them both absorbed, and stationary, for that long.

After pancakes we spent the morning on a playground near Jenn and Gregg's home.



Then we went home and, gasp, actually had an afternoon nap. All of five of us, I believe. Tom was deeply invested in the napping, so he continued to labor away at that end of things in the late afternoon while Jenn and I took the kids to the neighborhood reservoir, complete with grassy banks and an extensive playground. Toby is a little waterbug already, and it was great to see him wade right in. Edith was surprisingly less interested in the water than usual but was true to form in running for the baby swings.




In the evening, when Gregg had gotten home from work, he and Tom settled in for an evening of tending toddlers in front of The Chappelle Show, while Jenn and I headed out with Rebecca and a fourth friend, Emily, for a women's night out. After touring the condo on which Emily had just closed, we headed to one of my favorite restaurants in my former neighborhood, the one at which the assembled company had held my bridal shower, and where we now indulged in all the fancy drinks on the menu. Okay, not all of them. But enough to make me get a sense for what I may have missed out on way back in college.

The possibility of an adult night out with old friends, as if we had no kids or mortgages or other serious responsibilities, made me wistful to live near a larger critical mass of friends again.

And that was that. Wednesday was a long driving day, eight hours total due to an accident on I-95 that made us take a detour right at the start, plus a toddler-length stop at the same exit in western Connecticut as on the way up. None of which prevented our having to resort to the surreal-naming-nonsense game again for the last hour or two. If fate wanted to throw us for a 180 by making a second child as different from Edith as possible, he or she would be a happy traveler, often lulled by the motion of the car, content to ride in wheeled vehicles without protest for upwards of ten minutes at a time. I've heard there are some kids out there like that.

On the conversational side of things, some moments from the past few weeks...

Rebecca to Edith, as she inspected a fixture on the sidewalk: What's that?
E: Fire hydrant.
R: Right! What comes out of a fire hydrant?
E: Fire.

***

At some point during the trip Edith switched from asking, "Mommy milkie?" in a wheedling tone to stating categorically, "I want my milk!" The change in possessive pronoun felt not insignificant.

***

She also settled on a new grammatical construction for statements of negative desire: "I want not want..." means "I do not want..." We haven't seen a similar pattern with any other verbs.

***

Edith continued to prove the value of a wide-ranging literary, cinematic, and musical background to supply appropriate expressions in time of need, as in the following two incidents. Points given, as always, to those who identify the sources.

I. On our first morning in the Poconos, Conrad returned from the grocery store with, among other things, two bottles and one box of wine. The other adults ribbed him a bit, asking whether we really could drink so much in a four-night stay. As we laughed that we'd try our best, Edith piped up, "It will be my first party, father!"

II. On a dogwalk this evening, after Edith had been scooped up and forced to ride in Mama's arms on account of refusing to take the rocks out of her mouth, she started saying to the sky, "No...no..."
G: No what?
E: Nobody understands me.

***

The three of us were navigating our way through Boston's ancient cowpath street pattern from Brighton back to Arlington. In the driver's seat, Tom was looking ahead to determine which lane to get in to be properly positioned at the next five-way irregular intersection and so almost ran through the most immediate intersection.

"Red light!" I screamed. "Jesus!"

Tom slammed on the brakes, we screeched to a halt, and it was silent.

After a beat Edith asked, "What Mommy say?"

Embarrassed, I didn't answer.

"What Mommy say?" she repeated. "What Mommy say?"

"I said, 'Red light!'" I finally told her.

"Mommy say 'Red light!'?"

"Yes, Mommy said, 'Red light!"

"Mommy was a little scared," Tom told her.

"Mommy little bit scared?" she repeated. "Mommy say 'Red light!'?"

"Yes," I confirmed. "I wanted Daddy to stop the car."

"Mommy little bit scared? Mommy want Daddy to stop the tar? Mommy say 'Red light!'?" asked the little prosecuting attorney. We told her yes, we stood by our story.

A minute of silence passed as we crossed the river into Cambridge. Then from the depths of the backseat, "Mommy say 'Jesus.'"

As we tried to stay composed, Tom told Edith that I had been saying a prayer, because I was a little bit scared, but that it was a very short prayer. I agreed that I had hadn't had time to say the whole thing.

"Say 'Amen,' Mommy," instructed Edith. "God is good, God is great, thank him for our food. Amen."

We heard about Mommy being little bit scared and wanting Daddy to stop the tar for the next couple of days. But no more about Jesus.

Boston vacation, continued

V. Concord and Cambridge

On Sunday morning was the wedding for which we'd officially made the trip to Boston. Actually, it was not a wedding per se, as the bride and groom married in a private ceremony last January, but a party to celebrate. It was out at a country club in Concord on rolling golf greens, and it was obvious as people emerged from their cars whether they were there to play nine holes or toast to Dima and Ahmad. The crowd was very elegantly dressed and seemed to include many people who knew each other well reuniting after a long time apart.

Since I knew the bride from some modest activist work I had done in Boston in the late 1990s--around the issue of humane U.S. policy toward Iraq, ironically enough--and had only met her parents and siblings a few times, I didn't expect to know anyone else at the wedding. We would have felt quite overwhelmed, I think, had a woman with a kind face not plucked me out of the crowd and reintroduced herself as another friend of the bride's from Boston days, with whom I had once gone bike riding. Dima is one of those people with a gift for getting others together, and I began to recall what a lovely person this woman had been. Then we sat down at a table and found ourselves in warm conversation with one of Dima's professors from her undergraduate days at Brown. And when we finally got to our assigned table, it was filled with people who all had been activists in the group with which I worked eight years ago. If Dima has a gift for getting people together in the first place, she also has a gift for hanging onto them over the years.

And over the miles. She herself has lived in New Haven, Aman, and Tokyo since I last had seen her, now relocated to D.C. I knew that she had met her husband when she was living in Tokyo and he was living in Minnesota, and I was eager to hear the full story. Fortunately, the bride and groom supplied it to the assembled company. Indeed, her family put on an impressive show that included funny one-liners and amusing mocked-up newspaper stories from her brother, a touching tribute from her sister, lovely poetry recitation by her mother, and a rich and generous thanksgiving by her father. And the groom's closest friend kept everyone in stitches with his wry remarks on the both the groom personally and life as a Muslim-American today.

Amazingly, Edith sat reasonably well through all this. Perhaps because she was so entranced by a place where ice cream, or rather sherbert, was the first course at lunch?

The lovely bride

Later in the evening--later than our hosts had hoped!--we met up with some fellow academic-parent friends who used to live in Philly but who, sadly for us, moved to Boston this past year. They treated us to a scrumptious Thai dinner at home--the better for toddlers to jump down from the table and run around--before taking us down the street for ice cream. It was great to see them again, allowing us the chance to catch up on all things professional, which we rarely do in the company of other parents, as well as to see their wonderful son, Sam, after a year. He is about six weeks Edith's senior and lost no time in trying to reclaim the ground that he might have lost with her due to the prolonged absence. True to form, Edith remained stand-offish.

Consider their first meeting in July 2005, also over ice cream:


And their reunion last week:

In all fairness to Sam, who may in just a few years be icked out by the suggestion that he was macking on a girl, it should be reported that there was actually a toy car in his right hand in these latter shots, and that he was busy running it back and forth along the step in back of Edith. You know, the old "I'm just playing with my toy car" maneuver...

The walk home from the ice cream parlor was notable for Sam's jumping almost the whole four blocks and for our stopping in on our friends' next-door neighbors, who happen to be my closest friend from high school and her husband. I'd figured this out last December when addressing holiday cards. Small world.

VI. Arlington Center to Newton

Sheets of rain came down all day on Monday, soaking everyone and everything. That didn't stop us from having fun. The previous evening we had reluctantly sad goodbye to our first gracious host in Arlington, Rebecca, and moved two blocks to our second set of gracious hosts, Jenn, Toby, and Gregg. On Monday morning Toby introduced Edith to all his toys and books, as well as to the all-important Eddie, Toby's black-and-white kitty and best buddy. Edith was quickly taken with him and soon was joining Toby in searches for him around the house. His favorite spot is the storage drawer under the crib.

After a leisurely morning in the house, once again enjoying the ease of life with a better-than-equal adult-to-kid ratio, we finally headed out for lunch at a kid-friendly burger joint in Arlington Center. Yummy burgers, and then we dashed through the rain to a maternity center, where pregnant women and new parents can find classes, support groups, essential products, and professional assistance for a range of parenting needs. (We were in search of a bib.) As far as I know, it's a concept unknown in New Jersey. A maternity center, that is, not a bib.

Our next stop was an indoor playspace for children under 6, a concept also unknown in our corner of the world, unless the playspace is attached to a McDonald's. Edith had a great time.

Remember the parachute from elementary school gym class?

Late in the afternoon, we pried Edith away from the playspace and headed over to Newton to have dinner with my aunt Robin and uncle Ken. (You may have noted the absence of proper afternoon naps from this vacation. Edith certainly noted it...) Ken and Robin seemed on remarkably good terms for a couple who has been living for eight months in a single room with one dog, four cats, a guinea pig, no bath or shower (they wash at the YMCA), no cooking facilities (they live off the Whole Foods salad bar), and contractors banging all around them. Aunt Robin gave us a tour of the renovations to their house, which will be beautiful once done but are admittedly extensive. Edith didn't even recognize the space as a home and kept asking to "go back to the house," meaning the one inhabited room, where she had made fast friends with Minga the cat.


For some reason Aunt Robin had felt unequipped to serve us dinner at home, so we went out to a yummy restaurant in Watertown called Not Your Average Joe's. Aunt Robin and Uncle Ken did their best to look unfazed in their attempt to have a civilized meal and conversation with their guests, while a two year old climbed on her parents, rolled on the floor, pushed away all food set before her, announced two successive poopy diapers, and nursed three or four times at the table. I honestly thought it was about par for the course for us in restaurants these days, but seeing it through the eyes of people whose own children left that stage behind 20 years ago but who have not yet embarked on grandparenthood, I could tell that the year with a dog, four cats, and a guinea pig in a 10 x 15' room looked tame by comparison.

One of the play horses Aunt Robin gave Edith for her birthday nibbled at her nose

Alas, the final episode of our adventures will have to wait for yet a third installment, as midnight has struck and I'm feeling on the verge of pumpkin-hood.

The pools of the Poconos, the playgrounds of Menotomy

We have just returned from our first significant vacation (i.e. more than a weekend) for any purpose other than visiting relatives since Edith was born. We were the guests of Harrison's family for five days in the Poconos before being the guests of good friends from college in the Boston area, where we attended a wedding celebration and revisited many old friends and old haunts of our days in Beantown, where Tom and I first met. Even though she was a little young for it, we couldn't help taking Edith around to see the various houses in which each of us had lived. Upon being told at each one (there were four in all) that either Mommy or Daddy had lived there, she asked expectantly whether the other had lived there. We told her no, that this was before we were married.

"And Edith live there?" she asked at the first house. I told her no, that she hadn't been born yet.

"And Daddy not born yet?" she asked. I said no, Daddy had been alive, but he had lived in a different house and had come to visit me in this house.

"Edith not born yet," she repeated. A pause. "Then Edith come out Mommy's belly!" she announced. Well yes, about five years later. "Then Edith come out Mommy's belly!" became the refrain that ended the visit to each of our apartments.

But there were other Boston sites that neither Tom nor I had known while we lived there to which Edith introduced us. Most specifically, playgrounds. We are now well-steeped in the respective merits of one playground in Somerville and two in Arlington Heights, as well as an indoor children's playspace on the Arlington-Somerville border. It was a reminder that much has changed for us since we last were in Boston. Edith found taxing what seemed to us a relatively modest schedule of trying to visit with one or two good friends a day. Seen through her eyes, it was a matter of waking up in unfamiliar surroundings and climbing in and out of the car multiple times a day to go to unfamiliar houses with unfamiliar people, most of whom she actually has met before but almost none of whom she remembered, with none of the usual markers of routine in place. All things considered, she did remarkably well with it. But the days she liked best were the ones on which we ratcheted down the pace and hung out on the swings and slide for long stretches.

Meanwhile, we have tried to sow the seeds for a second generation of good friendships, re-introducing Edith to our friends' toddlers at a point when she is more likely to remember them, at least for a little while. When we got home to New Jersey, we showed her pictures of her previous meetings with these various little boys, ages 13 to 26 months, as well as with our adult friends, and she was delighted to recognize them in our albums.

For curious relatives, and as a log for myself, the illustrated play-by-play.

Part I. The Poconos

This part of the vacation was perfectly tuned to toddler temperaments. Get up, read some books and play with some toys, go to a playground, go to a swimming pool, nap, repeat. All in the company of her bestest buddy. For their part, the grownups enjoyed a respite from daily responsibility, the lovely scenery, double the number of hands normally available to care for kids, and best of all, the possibility for a late-night social life with interesting friends after the kids had gone to bed. (Incidentally, this vacation had me referring for the first time to "the kids," both in PA and MA. While having one child is something I've come to terms with, referencing "the kids" made me feel markedly older.)

Having overdosed on Trashy Town, Harrison asked Tom to share his own book, which also turned out to be about trashy town. "And then I saw that the pimps and the prostitutes on the corner were just like me," he read aloud. Harrison listened avidly.

Edith sampled no fewer than five swimming pools plus the Delaware River while we were in the Poconos. The best option by far, to which we returned multiple times, was a full-sized, resort-like pool full of islands and nooks and crannies....all of it under 3.5 deep and most of it under 2.5 deep. You could walk in gradually from an inclined edge, as at the beach, and there was a fantastic, rubbery slide shaped like a wrecked rowboat that was fun even for the grownups. Edith loved walking all over the pool by herself, and the few times she lost her footing and went under were badges of honor. As she told us later, "Edith go under water. Edith very brave."

II. Arlington Heights and Brighton

Edith and I drove up to Boston together last Thursday, Daddy having headed to Valley Forge for Methodist Annual Conference, to join us by train later in the weekend. The best surprise of the trip was stopping for lunch at a random exit in western Connecticut to find ourselves not on the expected fast-food strip but in a quaint little downtown, cut through by a bubbling river with benches along it. We had parked in front of a toy store, and after eating at the local coffee shop, I let Edith choose one item to help her get through the rest of the trip. The Thomas the Tank Engine train whistle lasted a good half hour. Then things got tougher, and only a surreal game of make-up-nonsense-names-for-people-we-know, unwritten rules by Edith, got us through to Arlington Heights, where good friend Rebecca was sitting waiting for us on the front stoop. Edith remembered her clearly and was at home with her within minutes, clamoring for her attention to books and toys, and asking her help in winding up a little mechanical bug on the bookshelf that had Edith intrigued.

While Rebecca was at band practice, Edith and I headed over to Brighton to see my college roommate, Lina, and her 16-month-old son, Elan. It took over an hour to go the eight miles during rush hour, and I remembered what I'd disliked about driving in Boston. Elan, on the other hand, was a charmer. We'd last seen him in schrunchy newborn stage and hadn't seen any pictures since, so it was with eager anticipation that I rang the doorbell, wondering what he would look like now. Absolutely adorable. While Lina whipped up supper for the two of us, Edith and Elan undertook a blueberry-eating competition. Elan kept it up long after he seemed satiated, determined not to let the big girl get the better of him. Between them they ate a pound of berries!


III. Downtown Boston

On Friday we set out with Rebecca, plus friends Jenn and 13-month-old Toby, for an adventure downtown. I think my promise that we were going to ride on a train didn't quite live up to Edith's expectations, once she realized that you couldn't see anything out the windows of this train. She was eager to get off after several stops, reminding me of my own dislike of the subway as a kid. But she did enjoy the part where the train emerges from underground and crosses the Charles River, skyline ahead and sailboats below.

The Boston Children's Museum, where both Tom and I had temped once upon a time, was a big hit. We barely scratched the surface of its many offerings, boosted by a recent renovation (the best part of which, for my money, was the replacement of McDonald's by AuBonPain as the in-museum restaurant).

Playing with trains in the 0-3yo room

Toby got into the thick of things, a hands-on stationmaster

Trained as a percussionst by his daddy from an early age, Toby knew just what to do during music hour

Duckzilla attacks a train trestle over the river

Both Edith and Toby conked out after lunch; Jenn took Toby on home, but I figured that the likelihood of Edith's staying asleep all the way from downtown through a subway ride, a transfer to the carseat, a car ride, and a transfer into the crib back in Arlington Heights was slim, so Rebecca and I decided to continue to spend time downtown, walking the Esplanade while Edith dozed in the stroller. She woke up to find herself facing a river full of boats with a breeze blowing through her hair. We walked back along the river, but the biggest delight for her were several dogs swimming in the sheltered pools on the side. For our part Rebecca and I were pleased to spot Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, with four of their ducklings swimming along behind. We then walked over to the Public Gardens, so Edith could see the bronze statues of these famous characters. She was taken with them immediately and had to test ride each one. Mama was highly gratified when a passerby exclaimed to the little rider, "I don't even know you and I might take pictures of you, you're so cute!"

Riding Ouack...

...and Mrs. Mallard

By the time we got back to Arlington, dodging some raindrops on the way, Edith was pretty wiped. A day full of new surroundings, with only an hour's nap in the stroller. So she wasn't the best dinner guest when we joined Jenn, Toby, and Gregg for dinner at a local Chinese restuarant. She sacked out good upon arriving back at Rebecca's and slept until an unbelievable 8:30 the next morning, punctuated by only one wake-up in the wee hours.

IV. Somerville

On Saturday we awoke to drums outside and discovered Arlington's 200th birthday celebration parade was going to be passing by momentarily. So we threw on clothes and went out for the fun.


Once the bands and horses and fire engines had passed, we did some errands in Harvard Square, a place Edith seemed to enjoy, before heading to my college friends' Rachel and Eli's house for lunch. Lina, Elan, and Dan met us there, too, and we got to visit with one of Bismarck's old friends, Rachel and Eli's lovely black lab, Trurl.

What transpired was an utterly leisurely afternoon, first at the house, then down the street at the local playground, where we all hung out for over three hours. Once again, the ratio of adults to kids made for a wonderfully relaxing time for the parents. We picked up some local Salvadoran food on the way back and had dinner in the backyard, by which point the kids were well wiped out. Good night of sleep #2. Around midnight, meanwhile, I picked up Tom from the train, and Daddy was there when Edith woke up in the morning.

It might be days if I wait to finish this blog before posting, so I'll post installment one now. Stay tuned.