Learning to Speak

A Bible story from thousands of years ago tells of a mighty tower that was built to touch the heavens. Seeing that man was growing brash, God decided to slow down man’s progress a bit by forcing everyone working on the Tower of Babel to speak a different language. Unable to communicate with each other, the workers went their separate ways, and the tower was left unfinished. (This curse has repercussions still today. Just try finding someone to work on your house who speaks the same language as you.) 

Parents of toddlers face a similar curse. We spend the first eighteen or so months of a child’s life being unable to understand him. Hunger, dirty diapers, thirst, exhaustion, and injury are all communicated with the same sound: crying.

Then the magical day comes: a child speaks his first word. For parents, this is an unbelievably joyful day.

He said his first word. Tomorrow he’ll add a few more. Next week he’ll be speaking in sentences. Soon after that, he can begin learning Mandarin. Medical school will surely follow. We’ll retire to that beach house yet!

Our expectations may not be entirely realistic.

My son’s first word was shoes. Once he realized that by repeating the same sound a few times he could get his parents to hold up the item in question and make complete fools of themselves, he began to seek other applications of this new skill. More words followed, and our house soon became a menagerie of concrete nouns. Then came the day he learned the word every parent hopes their child will never say…

No. It was inevitable, I guess. After more than a year of hearing things like no touching the stove, no throwing food, and no pulling the neighbor’s cat’s tale, the word was bound to surface in context. It is a harrowing day when you realize that your child can express a will contrary to yours.

Soon the word began infiltrating all manner of conversation:

Let’s go get in the car.

No!

Let’s put our coat on.

No!

Let’s eat some of our peas.

No!

Let’s skip dinner and have a dessert of ice cream covered brownies slathered in caramel.

No!

It is important to remember at times like these that language acquisition is a gift, not a curse. It’s only when your child asks to borrow the car for a cross country road trip that you’ll find yourself wishing you spoke a different language.

Trick-or-Treating with a Toddler

One of the saddest moments in a person’s life is the year they realize they can no longer go trick-or-treating. This occurs at different times for different people. Many children realize around age twelve that since their superman costume no longer fits, it’s probably time to give up tramping through the neighborhood with a pillow case begging for candy.

Other children take a bit longer. It is not uncommon to see groups of high school students roaming about on Halloween, some of them at least pretending to honor the traditions of this venerated holiday by claiming to be wearing a costume, even if it is their baseball uniform or a set of mismatched socks.

Eventually though, the dream of knocking on people’s doors and having them freely dispense candy ends for all of us. That is, until you have a toddler. I took my son trick-or-treating when he was 17 months old, deciding he was ready based on several acute observations:

1) He could walk

2) He could mumble three syllables that sounded like trick-or-treat

3) He was cute

Walking is important; if your trick-or-treater can’t walk, it might look like you are just carrying a baby around the neighborhood stumping for candy.

Coherent speech is important as well. In fact, I assert that baby-making should be planned so that the ability to walk and talk converge at the earliest possible Halloween. (Others would argue that procreation should be planned around the tax calendar, a theory that does have its own merits.)

Cuteness can not be overrated either. Let’s face it. Who’s getting more candy: the acne-speckled teenager with his hat on backward, or the toddler dressed as a skeleton saying, “Twick-uh-Tweet”?

So for now at least, I can skip staying home to pass out candy and take my own child out for a Halloween adventure. But what to do with all this candy that his pediatrician probably would not want him eating?

It's What's For Dinner

Every father fears for his child’s future. It’s easy to lose sleep at night worrying if your little boy will do well in school, make friends, or ask if he can join ballet.

But for me, one of my worst fears was almost realized before my son turned two.  He quit eating meat.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a vegetarian.  There are plenty of actors, university professors, and even real people who don’t eat meat.  I am just not one of them.

For me a balanced meal is one that includes beef, pork, and chicken.  So I was understandably dismayed when my son turned up his nose at his meat one afternoon. I grew concerned when he did it again the next day. I was severely alarmed the day after that. On day four of his self-imposed meat strike I considered calling the nurse hotline.

Surely a child whose father grills ribs in the garage in December just because he misses the charcoal taste should be more inclined to be a meat eater, shouldn’t he? It didn’t matter what kind of meat it was. Hamburgers, chicken strips, fish sticks, even hot dogs, barely identifiable as meat, were rejected.

With a two-year-old, one’s options are limited when it comes to convincing him to eat. You can pretend the spoon is an airplane, a rocket ship, maybe even a helicopter, but if the toddler isn’t into winged modes of transportation, you’ll get nowhere.

I don’t know why parents think that forks resemble airplanes. And I don’t know why we expect children to respond to this. Maybe it is a holdover from prehistoric days, when food was brought to hungry cave babies by pterodactyls. Maybe it's supposed to appeal to the inner risk-taker in a child. Certainly any kid who thinks diving headfirst off a toddler bed into a pile of freshly folded clothes can see the inherent risk in eating food delivered by a flying fork, and he should respond in excitement.

Just when I was seriously considering thinking about calling the doctor, even though my son's next checkup wasn't scheduled for six months, he returned from the dark side. After I put on a veritable air show with meat on a fork one day, my son ended his meat refusal policy.  Maybe he finally saw the error of his ways. Maybe it was the pterodactyl noises. Or maybe he just pitied me making a fool of myself.

Road Trip

People who keep track of such things tell us that the most accident-prone drivers are teenagers. But I’m not so sure. I get that it is difficult to concentrate on driving when one is simultaneously texting, changing songs on an MP3 player, fixing make-up, and checking a Facebook feed. I don’t see, however, that this level of distraction is any different than what the average parent of a toddler faces on any car trip longer than the driveway.

I try to prepare for long car tips by making my toddler as comfortable as possible. I give him a small bag of cheesy goldfish, and I present him with a pile of his favorite books. Alert and experienced parents are already shaking their heads, knowing that such efforts are in vain.

I learned this the hard way once on a trip across the Midwest with my toddler. Before leaving, I made sure he was properly nestled among Bernstein Bear books, with a full sippy cup and a bowl of raisins at his side. He even had his favorite blanket. My plan was virtually flawless. We were leaving just before nightfall, giving him a short amount of time to brush up on the virtues of familial love taught by the Bernstein Bears before drifting to sleep with a full belly and a comfortable blanket while I drove four hours through the peaceful darkness.

It was three minutes before the first raisin ricocheted off the windshield. Not wanting to disrupt the calm that was surely forthcoming, I turned briefly and gave him a mild frown. Turning my attention back to driving, I had just enough time to nudge the car back across the center line before The Bernstein Bears Love Their Neighbors plopped beside me, knocking over my Mountain Dew and spilling my bag of skittles.

Unfazed, I turned again, this time to deliver a threat. I stopped short of promising to take his books and food away, thinking this would only guarantee that he would not drop into a dreamy slumber quite as quickly.

As I refocused on the road, planting my feet firmly on the brakes to avoid developing a short-term relationship with the driver ahead, I realized almost immediately that I should have considered disarmament. A brief barrage of paperback children’s books was followed by an invasion of Croc-wielding feet slamming into the back of my seat.

With one hand replacing the lid on my soda and the other hand plucking a grape skittle off the floor, I carefully navigated a lane change with my knees while admonishing my son in the rear view mirror.

I eased into my new lane, only to be cut off by a teenage girl lost in conversation on her cell phone. Watch the road, kid, I muttered under my breath. 

He's Touching Me!

At some point when I was not paying attention, child safety laws must have changed.  Otherwise I can’t imagine how my family, with three boys in the backseat, was able to make even a routine trip to the grocery store, let alone a cross-country trek to see Mount Rushmore.

My parents did not spring for luxury cars while my brothers and I lived at home.  This may have had something to do with the odd reaction that leather has to chocolate milkshakes. Or it may have been related to the repeated experiments we attempted involving crayons left in the back window on sunny days.

So we spent our childhood in Honda Civics and Buick Regals, all with enough miles on them to put Magellan to shame. The back seat was not the idyllic realm of learning and entertainment that we often see in cars today. No, it was a wrestling mat, baseball field, and dining room, sometimes simultaneously. Countless times, the backseat was also a bedroom. It was genius really. The boy in the middle moved to the floor, where he could watch the road whiz by through holes in the floorboards, while the other two unbuckled their seatbelts in order to sprawl across the newly opened middle seat. 

Now that I have children of my own, things are a bit different. The use of car seats by children older than three has become something of a law. Now, I’m sure the world is safer because of it, (Or at least the car seat makers are richer) but I think we have lost something in the process. And when I say “we” I mean we the parents who have to purchase a new car seat for each year of our child’s life until 8^th grade graduation. And when I say “lost something” I am referring to the $90 price tag on each of these new car seats. And when I say “process” I mean the endless dumbfounded stares in the car seat aisle as we try to distinguish between the level four and level five child safety seat.

A typical exchange between two normally rational adults might go something like this:

“Are you sure we need another car seat?”

“Yes, it’s the law in our state.”

“But our son is six years old.” 

“Yep, I’m pretty sure next year he can be in a booster seat instead.”

“Did you sit in a car seat when you were six years old?”

“No, I slept on the floor in the back seat, but times have changed.”

Sigh

“This one has cup holders.”

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for safety.  I just don’t think when I pull up to school to drop my son off for the first day of second grade that I should have to get out of the car to unclip his safety seat. I don’t think I should need to use a chisel to clean my car because of fruit snacks dropped under a car seat in April that are discovered in November.

How are children supposed to learn about property rights, trespassing, and summary justice if they are unable to draw lines in the seats that siblings can’t cross? Being perched in a car seat makes such rites of passage impossible. The very fabric of our democracy may be at stake!  We have lost something here. Adventure, dignity, and another $90.

Someone to Watch over You

I took my toddler to an art museum recently.  (It was actually called an “Art Institute,” which, in retrospect, was a better name.)

 For those of you who don’t regularly patronize art museums, allow me to ease your mind about jumping in to such a rich, cultural experience: Don’t bother.

 We knew something was wrong when we entered the front door and were asked to leave the diaper bag by the front desk.  What kind of twisted individual parts a toddler from his diapers, cheerios, and three extra pairs of pants?  And furthermore, what exactly were we going to stuff into the diaper bag and make off with?  It’s not like anything in the art museum was actually recognizable as art.  The primary display in the lobby was a collection of wire sculptures, kind of like what you get every year when you pull the Christmas lights out of storage to find that three strands have actually braided themselves together in the attic… only a lot more disorganized.  The masses of wire vaguely resembled human beings in various painful looking poses, possibly simulating a yoga class. 

We set off into a side room that contained what I suppose were meant to be paintings.  They were in frames and contained many colors, at least.  My son was quickly losing interest in anything but trying to touch the artwork.  I pulled him away from a masterpiece containing shades of grey interspersed with red lines just before he was able to get close enough to set off the art alarm.

 This movement did not go unnoticed, however, as a thin, pale woman cleared her throat in the opposite corner and began to take considerable interest in our wanderings.  I led my son into the next room, hoping that at least one artist had been inspired by an airplane, a fire truck, or at least a noun of some kind.

 But trailing 15 feet behind us was the woman with the previously mentioned throat obstruction- now obviously revealed as art museum security.  I wondered briefly what to do.  Should I feign interest in the artwork?  Walk away and pretend the toddler tugging on my leg wasn’t mine?

 Finally I decided to brave the bent wire exercise class and make a run for the door.  We made it just before art museum security could bring us in for questioning (a good thing, too; I sure wouldn’t want to have to explain what I was doing in an art museum.)  I guess for the foreseeable future the Winnie the Pooh coloring book will be the limit of my son’s art exposure. 

A Good Little Monkey

Every father wants his child to grow up and be a genius. We want our kids to be able to understand the world, solve problems, win Nobel Prizes, and furnish our vacation homes during retirement. To this end, we begin reading to them before they can even focus their eyes to see the pages. As my son progressed from “board books” [Books that contain upwards of seven words but are printed on heavy-duty cardboard to prevent children from destroying them and so the publisher can charge $19.99 for them] to more toddler-friendly material, I found myself suddenly remembering the books I was reading from my own childhood. And was I ever surprised. Take Curious George for example. In my childhood, the Curious Little Monkey was always in great danger. In one book alone he was thrown in jail, escaped by balancing on a power line, floated hundreds of feet in the air held up only by balloons, and landed on a street amidst rush hour traffic. The more recent renditions of George’s adventures, however, are not quite so fraught with peril.  These days George goes to the beach, and gasp, loses his picnic basket. This is hardly the material of a compelling plot. [Although this particular title does feature the Man in the Yellow Hat wearing a bathing suit, flip-flops, and sunglasses.]  In another recent Curious George story he takes a trip to the aquarium where he faces the imminent threat of entering the penguin paddock. Yes, penguins, those bloodthirsty, flightless killers.  George miraculously escapes and is made an honorary staff member at the aquarium.  Really? Is that the lesson I’m to teach my young son? Here, son, hop over this fence and play with the giraffes. When zoo security arrives I’m sure they’ll make you an honorary staff member rather than haul my butt to prison and refer me to child endangerment. Yes, gone are the days when Curious George smoked a pipe after breakfast, joined the circus, and flew rockets into outer space. H.A. Rey’s memory is not being honored here. So instead of my son learning to face adventures and hardships armed only with his curiosity, he gets gentle reminders to keep better watch over his picnic basket. This is not how Rhodes Scholars are made; I may need to rethink my retirement strategy.