Category Archives: Baby

The Death Star Strikes Back

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Lennie turns out to be a Star Wars fan. A couple of months ago, we somehow got on the topic of Star Wars, and she had many questions. We answered what we could and then deflected to various aunts and uncles once we were over it. She’s persisted in wanting to watch the movies. This is the girl who had previously not been able to watch Ratatouille because it was too scary. Yes, the animated children’s movie by Disney or Pixar or whoever.

We had told her, after much pestering, that she could watch Star Wars after she turned five. Two or three weeks ago, we were at the movie store, and she brought the movie up again. So we got the first one (technically the fourth one, but the first one that was made), and she loved it. She wasn’t outwardly afraid of Darth Vader or even the shooting, though she was curious about all the shooting. She had plenty of questions (less irritating to field when you’re not answering for a person with no context whatsoever) but seems to have mostly gotten it.

She’s been wanting ever since to see the next movie, and we got it this weekend. She’s having trouble getting what the Empire is, I think (“a group of people, sort of like a state or country, and the Emperor is like the king of these people”), and today she called the movie The Death Star Strikes Back at one point. I didn’t get to watch the movie with her today (decided to paint a room on the spur of the moment and had to finish the job), but she mostly stuck with it and I think wasn’t too afraid. She told me at one point today that she was a lot like Obi Wan because she was very brave and so probably wouldn’t be afraid of it. I told her that I thought she’d change her tune once the Emperor came out and started throwing lightning at people (thougy maybe that happens in the next movie?). She came to join me in the room I was painting once when Darth Vader and Luke were fighting. She wasn’t too keen on watching that. I think it had less to do with the actual physical violence than with Luke’s dilemma, since she told me that what bugged her was that Darth Vader was trying to make Luke be naughty. My daughter the moral philosopher!

Finn: A Lexicon

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Finn says lots of things that nobody else can understand without help. Here are a few that I enjoy:

  • Agackle: motorcycle, most often said while inviting me to lie down on my side and provide my arm as a handlebar or while riding me when I’ve agreed to strike that pose. He can say motor and cycle independently and with chronological proximity, but he never puts the two together.
  • Dursh: Fish.
  • Garp: Grape. This is a new one. He first calls them berries, and then when I tell him they’re grapes, he says garp sort of from the back of his mouth. Maybe he’s just a fan of John Irving’s fiction.
  • Abbey: Sometimes his aunt’s name, sometimes his cousin’s name, sometimes “up please.”
  • Dooce: Juice.
  • Holmp. Help.
  • Shoon. Shoes.
  • Atide: Outside.
  • At: Hat.
  • Ath: Ice.
  • Mao mao: This is the sound a cat makes, often substituted for the word cat.
  • Beebow: Baseball. Lately, instead of a snuggly furry animal or blankie, he sleeps with a baseball glove complete with grass-stained old ball from my childhood.
  • Annie: Andy (as in his uncle)
  • Uh Lah Doo: I love you (copycatting).
  • Adone: All done.
  • Nennie: Lennie.
  • Ulla: Ella, or sometimes just “somebody else.”
  • Yedldlow: Yellow, sort of shouted, usually in response to having it sort of yelled out to provoke him to say it. The “dldl” part is a general rattling around of his tongue in his mouth and takes different forms at different times.
  • Bone. Phone.

Bobby

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It’s my impression that by the time Lennie was Finn’s age, she was already speaking a ton of words, mostly the names of animals from an animal book we’ve also shared with Finn (though probably less often — having two kids is harder than having one, and you wind up short-changing both in lots of ways that make you feel really bad). Finn is turning out to be a little more sluggish with words (it’s pretty common for boys, I believe), but he’s finally started to show an interest in words and other linguistic feats. For example, he’s pretty good for saying “dog” now. He routinely says “mama,” but he tends to use it in a pretty general sense, usually barking it whenever he wants something. After some work with the animal book, he’ll volunteer “neeee” if you ask him what a horse says, and with a little prompting, he’ll do a chicken sound. The most impressive thing at the moment is that he’s picked up “bite, please,” which is what we croon at him when he’s insisting “maMA” and reaching for food. He’s not terribly consistent about it yet, but it’s not uncommon for him to say “bite, please” when he wants food or drink, though it comes out more like “Bobby” with a big pause in the middle.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

Standing

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It’s shocking how little I’ve blogged about Finn. He’s about midway between 10 and 11 months old now, and I don’t know that I’ve written about him more than two or three times, including his quick birth announcement. Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon…

Anyway, this week he has begun to stand up on his own at some length. He’s occasionally accidentally stood up for a few seconds, but now he lets go of whatever he’s holding on to and stands confidently, twisting around to grab other things or even to pick big heavy things (like a hippo walk-behind toy) up. He’s very close to taking his first steps. Sometimes if you reach for him as he’s standing there, you’ll start to see one of his feet twitch a little and you can tell he’s thinking about moving it, but then he lowers himself and crawls to you instead.

He’s not talking yet, but he pretty consistently says “duh” when the dog is around (though that’s his main word for most things, so I’m not sure it counts). He had been signing “more” for food, but he’s left that behind. He waves goodbye and does “stick-em-up,” which is where we put him in his little booster seat and squeal “stick-em-up” at him and fling our hands into the air, whereupon he flings his own hands up, allowing us to snap the dinner tray into place. We did this with Lennie too.

He has eight teeth and has had them for months (I think). He got teeth early just like Lennie (but earlier).

He continues to be an absurdly happy baby, though he’ll now occasionally protest loudly if something gets taken away from him (which happens often when Lennie’s around and feeling territorial about her stuff). (See the picture, which I wish we had in full color but which a stray finger caused to be taken accidentally with some weird color-extraction setting turned on.)

This weekend, I got a football out in anticipation of tossing it around some before the Super Bowl (it rained, so we didn’t), and Finn loved chasing it around on the floor. He also really likes driving cars around on the ground. This isn’t something Lennie ever did, and it’s not something we taught him. He’s just naturally more interested in things with wheels than Lennie ever was.

I haven’t noticed him doing it a lot in the last couple of weeks, but for a while, he would bob his whole body to dance to music. More recently, he’s taken to bouncing his arm up and down conductor-style when he hears a catchy tune.

He’s beginning to get something of a mullet. By the next time I manage to blog about him, he’ll probably be a teen-ager, and we’ll have to see if mullets are back in style then and if he’s one of the cool kids who has one.

Peas and Carrots

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Well, Finn is an eater now. About a month ago, I wrote that he’d nibble on a carrot if one was offered, but at the time, he still wasn’t very much into eating spooned food. The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of progress on that front. At first, I could jam a spoon of rice cereal into his mouth and he’d sort of gag but keep most of it down. This past weekend, he really turned a corner and started opening up his little bird mouth and even moving his head (like a cobra?) to get to the disgusting purees I offered. So far, his favorites are brown rice with peas (shudder) and sweet potatoes. He’ll eat a medium jar of the former in two meals, which still doesn’t represent too hearty an appetite, but it’s a big step forward. We also have these barley teething biscuits that are, post-teething, the nastiest thing I’ve ever voluntarily touched. They dissolve pretty quickly into a light brown sludge that coats his chest and hands. I’m not terribly squeamish, but even I wince a little to pick one of these slimy things up for him when he drops it. Once we’re through this box, I think we’re switching to Zwieback toast.

Finn is also a full-on crawler now. Mleeka and others wanted to allow that he was crawling long before I would accept his movements as crawling (I mean, c’mon, wallowing and spinning around on your butt to get to things within a 3-foot radius is impressive for a little tyke, but crawling it ain’t). Finally, a couple of weeks ago, he started doing real crawling, and now he gets around without any trouble, often making a bee-line for the cat’s water dish, which he delights in turning over. He also pulls himself up on things and can stand up assisted. This weekend, he woke up and crawled out of our bed and fell to the floor (which is a 3-foot-plus drop). We installed a gate at the top of our stairs and are trying to decide now what to do about his out-of-bed crawling, whether we can think up some sort of preventive measures or whether to see how long it takes him to learn a valuable lesson on his own about depth perception and exploring a bit more carefully.

Pees and Carrots

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No, it’s not a misspelling. For a couple of weeks now, we’ve sent Lennie to bed without a pull-up. She had been waking up with a dry pull-up pretty regularly, and then we just ran out of them, so I started dressing her in her most absorbent undies for bed and hoping for the best. She’s had accidents only twice so far, and one of those was a small enough accident that the undies soaked up all the pee anyway. It’s been only in the last few months that we’ve had any consistent success at potty-training, so this is a pretty big deal. She’s been a fully self-guided daytime pottier for a month or two, and now she’s mostly a non-bed-wetter.

Insert inspiring and graceful transition here.

When he was about 5 months old, we tried to introduce some non-boobie-milk food to Finn, mashing up some banana. He was very interested, having been in the habit for a while of watching us intently while we ate and lunging with impressive force and accuracy (and often success) to grab our dinner plates and pull them toward him. He’s like a little savage at the dinner table. But he wasn’t quite ready for solid food yet, and he choked a little and we had the necessary heart attacks and put solidish food of for another month. Last week, I got out a carrot for him and held it for him to let him gnaw on it while I ate my dinner. He would grab it and jam it into his mouth with gusto. Then he’d shave at it for a minute with his two bottom teeth, pull it out suddenly, and give it a puzzled look and repeat the process. Yesterday, we tried giving him some rice cereal, and he choked again (I don’t remember Lennie having so much trouble, and we got her started earlier than we did him), but I later gave him some more carrot, and he did ok with it, probably because he seems to have managed mostly to shave little bits off and get them all over his face and chest.

Insert inspiring and graceful conclusion here.

Finn

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Finn at six monthsWhen Lennie was very young, I’d take time every few months to write a bunch of things about what new things she was doing, almost always prefaced by something like “I’m a crappy dad for not doing a better job of documenting things.” It turns out that having a second kid makes you an even crappier dad, as I don’t believe I’ve written one word about Finn since I first announced his birth nearly six months ago. It’s been long enough that I don’t really even know how to begin.

He’s a healthy boy, by which I mean he seems to be of generally strong constitution (if you forget the bout with croup he had a couple of weeks ago) and that he’s something of a hoss. I don’t remember his exact weight right now, but he’s coming up on 22 pounds, which let’s just say breaks the curve. And yet he’s not grossly fat, like some heavy babies. He’s got big thick legs and hefty arms, but he’s skinnier through the middle than Lennie was at this age, I think.

He’s also a cheerful boy. From the beginning, he was always peaceful. We could actually put him down in his bouncy and he’d sit there happily for a while. Nowadays, he more often wants to be held, but we do get him down for naps on his own sometimes, and he’s pretty good for sitting up and playing on the floor with some toys for a few minutes at a time (which is new in the last week or two, this sitting up steadily on his own). If he catches you smiling at him, he’ll light up with a big grin of his own, and his laugh is a lot like Lennie’s was when she was first coming into her infant laugh. A couple of months ago, Dad emailed us a picture of me as a baby at about Finn’s then-age, and the resemblance was striking. So it’s safe to say that he’ll be a handsome devil.

He got his first two teeth at roughly the same time when he was around 4 months old. Lennie got her first tooth at about the same age, but hers was a weird side tooth, and his are the bottom two in front. And boy are they sharp. One of his favorite toys these days is a little wooden spoon that he applies to the teeth. I’m thinking of giving him a file and seeing just how sharp he can get them.

Finn’s best trick these days is doing push-ups. Like honest to goodness push-ups. We’ll put him on his tummy, and he splays his arms and legs out and gets full abdominal clearance, pushing his butt up in the air higher even than his head sometimes. He’ll hold this pose for a while and then go down and right back up. So steadfastly was he performing this exercise a week or two ago that he actually sheared off part of one of his big toenails.

Lennie adores him and is a great big sister. For example, we nearly drove off a couple of weeks ago without having remembered to fasten part of his seatbelt, and she cried out for us to stop. Sometimes she loves him almost too much, applying herself to him rather like the Steinbeck character who cuddles his puppy (or is it a bunny?) to death.

There’s more, and more, but this is what I can manage for now.

A Hump like a Snow-hill

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Moby Dick has long been one of my favorite books. It’s part adventure story, part whaling encyclopedia, and it’s just good prose, dramatic, poetic stuff. It’s something of a precursor to things we see today like the fascinating and entertaining show The Deadliest Catch, which details the mechanics and the drama of fishing for crab on the Bering sea. If you like the latter, it may be a misstep to dismiss the former.

When Lennie was still in utero and we were trying to think of ways to let her hear my voice, I thought of reading Moby Dick to her. It doesn’t matter what words you’re saying, but matters only that the child can hear you. Also, though it’s one of my favorite books, it’s one that Mleeka never read and has never had any interest in reading. Our effort fizzled thanks to a lack of enthusiasm on her part (as I recall it; it’s possible the book just put her to sleep).

This past Christmas, I got a radically condensed, cartoon version of the book (not to be confused with the comic book version I got for my birthday), the idea being that it was something I might share with Lennie. To be honest, the book isn’t that great. The drawings are pretty crude, and though the book hits the high points of the plot, it’s just not the best sort of thing to read with a kid because of the way it’s laid out. But a few weeks ago, Lennie developed on her own a very keen interest in having it read to her. Probably a dozen times or so now, we’ve glossed it at bedtime. I don’t bother reading the words so much as pointing to pictures and telling Lennie the names of the people and explaining that the whale and Ahab are grumpy. Now she tells me these things. She can identify on her own the characters Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and Queequeg (volunteering the names of the former two). And of course, she knows the white whale’s name and that the sailors wield harpoons on their hunt for him. She can also tell the difference between the pictured right (or baleen) whale, and she’s close to being able to volunteer that the right whale has no teeth but has baleen instead. She’s very interested in the ouchies that appear on Moby Dick’s flank (bright red ribbons of blood trailing behind), and she understands that Ahab (who she knows has a peg-leg) is grumpy because Moby Dick bit his leg off.

And finally, as of this weekend, when we get to the page on which Moby Dick is first sighted from the crow’s nest, she’ll say in a theatrical voice that I may be responsible for having helped her develop for the purpose, “Thar she blows! A hump like a snow-hill!”

Mleeka refuses still to read even the abridged book with Lennie, and I consider it my duty to raise a little fanatic to exact revenge, which is, after all, one of the book’s core themes.

Finn is here

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Finn is here

At 5:06 p.m. on March 19, Finnegan Samuel Learn Houston was born by C-section after 37 hours of painful labor. Weighing in at 11 pounds and with his head craned back at a weird angle, there was no way he was coming out in the conventional way. We’re home today after a few days of recovery in the hospital.

Insomnia

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Off and on for years, I’ve suffered from insomnia. I remember nights during high school that I couldn’t get to sleep and found myself, after having tried all the standard relaxation techniques, weeping at 5:00 in the morning because I was so worn out from nights of having not slept. I think it eased up some in college, though I’ve had some trouble sleeping lately. If tonight is any indication, however, I’ve passed an insomnia gene along to my daughter.

Mleeka and her sister Abbey went out to a movie tonight, and I was charged with getting Lennie to sleep. Which in theory wasn’t hard, as they left at around her bedtime, and I was reading her a bedtime story per the usual routine as they left. Comfortable that she was going to drop off to sleep soon as always, I found a movie (the pretty recent “Casanova” on Comcast’s On Demand with Heath Ledger and Oliver Platt, which movie was most entertaining, especially if you happen to have studied comedy as a literary form) and settled in for a poor deserted husband’s night alone (bam chicka bam). As you may have guessed, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but that didn’t stop me from peeking into Lennie’s room from time to time. Several times, I found her counting her toes or mumbling to herself. It’s not terribly uncommon for her to play around for a while before going to sleep, so this was no big deal. When I peeked in on her at 10:00, figuring she must surely be asleep, I found her sitting on the floor beside her bed reading a book.  This was two hours after bedtime. So I went in to see if maybe I could cuddle her for a few minutes to help her get to sleep. She told me she wanted to pee on the potty, so I picked her up and found that her diaper was half off and that she had two legs in one leg of her pajamas (clearly having tried to take matters into her own hands). I took her in to sit on her potty and noticed that she had the saddest wet little tear in the world sitting on her cheek. I decided that rather than putting her back to bed, where she clearly was having no luck going to sleep, I’d snuggle her on the couch in front of the rest of my boring grown-up movie. It didn’t help.

At around 11:00, Mleeka got home, and Lennie was still awake. We sat around watching TV for a bit longer, and at around midnight, I finally convinced the two of them to go to bed. It appears that they’re now both asleep.