Development III -- Teething (Part I)

5:06 a.m. -- 7 months, 28 days

"So, you looking forward to going back to work?"

I get this question a lot. Until a couple of weeks ago, each time I'd answered with some variant of "Not really."

It's not that I dislike my job or my employer or my colleagues. It's simply that spending time watching Baby A grow has been a privilege. Every day sees some development, some new physical ability ("She sucks her toes!"), some synapse firing that hadn't fired in the weeks or moments before ("She hears cars!").

Plus, being the primary parent has alleviated much of the biological imbalance that allows (and requires) breast-feeding mothers hours of nurturing time. Though she's gone for most of the day, M maintains a tie to Baby A that I'll never share. It's a complex bond -- when she catches sight of M returning from work, Baby A usually smiles broadly, then bursts into tears. There is need and elemental hunger mixed with the love and nurturance. But its level of intensity is unmatched by any connection a father can provide.

Still, spending the bulk of time with the kid has built ease into our relationship. Baby A likes me, and she's confident that I understand her needs. Thus I can calm her just as easily as her mother can. (More easily, at times.) Indeed, since I understand the rhythms of her day, on the weekends I often find myself explaining to M that the baby always, say, gets tired around 9 in the morning, or hungry at 3:30 in the afternoon.

When I see a father awkwardly struggle to placate his infant or quickly hand the fussy child to its mother, I feel grateful that these months have enabled me to put the "co-" in co-parent.

Of course, for her first seven months Baby A was an "easy baby," "good" in the sense (to use my mother's definition) that she generally proved convenient for her caretakers. Indeed, she was a godsend for nervous new parents. When M and I anxiously pondered the reason for her tears, our standard cry became "First principles!" And sure enough the reason was usually a wet diaper, or hunger, or fatigue.

Also, bless the fates, we haven't had a lot to worry about. Baby A's growth has tracked classic patterns, and for the most part she's stayed ahead of the developmental curves. And her growth has been largely linear, her progress coming in steady steps. First, for example, she slept for a couple of hours straight, then a solid three hours, then mostly a steady four or five, throwing in an occasionally blessed six-hour stretch.

Then the kid grew her first tooth. And suddenly I began anticipating my return to the daily slog of commuting, lesson planning, teaching, and essay grading with renewed verve.

Crawling Update

5:06 a.m. -- 7 months, 9 days

Baby A crawls.

To date this has proven true only for brief spurts, under the most limited and specific of circumstances. That circumstance involves the greatest book in the history of the Western canon: "Who Hoots?"

From my perspective "Who Hoots?" is, to be generous, a modest achievement of children's literature. The drawings of animals on each page are brightly colored but clumsily rendered. The author, Katie Davis, distracts from the narrative thrust by tossing silly asides into the animals' mouths. (E.g., "You need to brush your teeth," a hippo and alligator say to each other, mouths agape.) It's kind of dopey and, to my eyes, of limited charm.

But I don't share my critique with Baby A, who for the chance at a fresh reading of this orange- and yellow-covered tome would no doubt crawl over shattered glass. (Having had a similar childhood passion for a book called "The Camel Who Took A Walk," I empathize.)

Much of this has to do with her developing sense of humor. Baby A likes to laugh, and what makes her laugh most are situations in which the set-up builds in a repeated, rhythmic routine, so the development provides more joy than the punch line.

To wit: I was driving and M was beside Baby A in the back when the windows began to fog. M asked in a voice of mock outrage, "What is going on back here? Is there snuggling in the back seat? Is there snuggling in the back seat?" This was followed by further snuggles and smooches and general merriment. Now in the car all M has to do is ask, "What is going on back here?" and Baby A will grin with anticipatory delight.

The same principle works with all of our best routines: "Rain," "Circus Act," "National Security Sniffing," "Oodle Boodle Noodle Cheese Doodle Poodle," "Piledriving Smackdown" (including the failsafe "Upside Down Baby"), "Who Fell Down?" etcetera, ad nauseum.

M's expressive face has been a godsend in spurring Baby A's appreciation of slapstick. If the kid's in the right mood, all we have to use is one of two moves: elongate face, purse lips, and bug out eyes; or scrunch face, squint, and shift eyes from side to side. Cue the sniggering.

(All of this baby entertaining has made me want to take a course in advanced physical comedy: Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, The Little Rascals, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, and Gene Wilder could surely teach me some new, which is to say old, moves.)

The singular brilliance of "Who Hoots?" stems from its repetitive combination of negation, delayed payoff, and expectation reversal. The reader is asked a question: Who hoots? This is followed by three pages featuring animals that do not, indeed, hoot (a dog, pig, and horse). Then comes a page saying, "Owls don't hoot," featuring a picture of a surprised and perhaps insulted owl. (As I said, the drawings are crude.) The next page responds, "Yes they do!" and under a picture of a satisfied owl are listed a couple of owly facts (they hunt at night and have swively necks). The book then answers similar questions regarding buzzing, squeaking, roaring, and quacking.

(Come to think of it, "The Camel Who Took A Walk" also featured negation, delayed payoff, and expectation reversal. A series of animals in a jungle thicket poise to pounce on each other, waiting for a strolling camel to reach a certain sun-dappled spot. At the last minute, just before reaching the spot, the camel turns and goes back. The end. Possible Ph.D. thesis: "Epistemolgies of Anticipation and Repudiation: 'The Odyssey,' 'Young Frankenstein,' and 'Who Hoots?'")

I believe that the genius of "Who Hoots?" resides less in its text than in its performance. M and I have developed an inspired reading that features a number of interpolations that are, while much appreciated by our audience, at best only implied by the author: abundant animal noises; a slow, confused rendering of the false statement ("Owls ... don't ... hoot"); an outraged howl, registering somewhere above falsetto, that appears nowhere in the text ("WHAT?"); followed by a similarly outraged declaration, at the same pitch, of "Yes they do!"

At any moment of the day or night we can grab Baby A's attention by uttering in our accustomed tone either the phrase "Yes they do!" or its cousin, "That's not right!" The infant's own swively neck is often employed when she hears one of these phrases across a crowded room.

At any rate, Baby A could pass every waking hour pawing through and hearing performances of "Who Hoots?"

So a few nights ago, in a crude experiment designed to improve the child's crawling skills, M followed a reading by tossing the book a few paces and asking, "Baby A, who hoots?" Baby A spun out of M's lap, dropped to her hands and knees, crawled without a second's hesitation, and slapped her hands on the beloved volume. Repeated tossings had the kid crawling half-way across the Buddha room, proving the thesis beyond scientific doubt. Baby A won't crawl for any old thing, but she'll crawl for "Who Hoots?"

Librarians across the land would no doubt be pleased.