This is my first post in four-and-a-half years. Baby A is now, as she says, five and three-quarters years old -- old enough to have shed the adjective and become, simply, “A.” She starts first grade in September; later that month, she’ll turn 6.

The bulk of this post belongs to A. Yesterday afternoon we were driving home from the birthday party of a friend. Reading is by a decisive margin her favorite activity, but she had no books. So, as we sometimes do, we agreed to tell each other stories. I asked her to go first, and she filled the remainder of the drive with the tale that follows. After we got home, I wrote it down as quickly as I could, using her language as precisely as I could recall. If that strains credulity, let me briefly say that her use of language remains precocious, which I’ll demonstrate with two examples from Friday.

1). When we stopped in a bagel shop she said, with a glance at the establishment’s weak, aged chandeliers, “This room is ill-lit.”

2). As we walked through Castle Williams, an 18th-century fort on Governors Island that had been converted during the Civil War to a prison holding Confederate soldiers, a park ranger noted that 60 prisoners would be crammed into a small-ish room with only a barrel for a shared toilet. After she’d processed that, A asked me, “Did they get mattresses?” No. “Pillows?” No. “A bottom sheet?” No. “A blanket?” Yes. “Was it thin?” Yes. “Raggedy?” Yes. “Threadbare?” Yes, I’d say it likely was.

Here’s A’s story, which I’ll call “Princess Marita and The Pebblestone.”

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Princess Marita. Princess Marita went to Sunday school, which started at 9 o’clock in the morning. There were terrible punishments for students who came late, so she hurried from home after calling quickly “Goodbye, goodbye!” to her mama and papa, the king and queen. She made it to Sunday school on time and had a good lesson. When she returned, only her mama was home. Her mama told her that her papa had fallen ill, gone to the hospital, and died that afternoon.

Some time later, her mama went out on a date, and Marita heard a voice inside her, telling her to go on a quest. She knew who the voice was. And when she started off, she knew she was entering a world of different time -- like in Narnia, when Lucy can stay for a week and return through the wardrobe door and find that only a few minutes have passed. So she set out on her quest: to find the pebblestone, guarded by a fierce boar and lying in the center of a red violet in the middle of a field of red violets.

She called for her fairy friend, who gave her a velvet-lined coach and two fine horses. She rode all through the night, and though the horses were tired she urged them on, and they understood, knowing the importance of her quest. She arrived and saw the boar guarding a cave. The boar never slept and could power itself by moving only its eyes. She waited one whole day and one whole night, but the boar did not leave. But the next day the boar set off to hunt for food, and Marita knew she must act quickly. So she hurried into the cave and found the field of violets, where she searched and searched. Finally she found it: the red violet with the purple pebblestone at its center. She quickly took the pebblestone and rode in her carriage back to her land, where she found her mama’s date still had an hour to go.

Marita said a magic spell over the pebblestone, and her papa came back to life. So when her Mama returned she found Marita and her papa waiting for her, and the family was overjoyed to be together again. And they lived happily ever after.

Naming

The following is an email exchange M and I had this week with a friend who, shortly after earning her Ph.D., is due to have a baby this spring. We’ll call her T and her spouse B.

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 3:09 PM, T wrote:

Hey there,

I wanted to send this to you both. We are leaning towards using my last name for the baby, but have come up against some pretty strong resistance from B’s mom and sister when we mentioned we were thinking of it. The whole last name thing is so annoying. Neither of us wants to change our last names or to join last names or to make up a new one, so we have to pick one of ours for the kid. We don’t really care which we pick, so we have been thinking that--all other things being equal--we might as well take the feminist option and use my last name. You are the only people we know who used the mother’s last name. All of my friends who kept their own (ok, their fathers’) names used the male last name for their kids. I think the only answer for the last name problem is diversity--couples making all kinds of different decisions to break the rule that Father’s name goes. So, on principle that’s where we are. But dealing with hurt and unhappy family members is another story (or maybe not, maybe it’s par for the course, but it sucks). Part of it for B’s family is that he is the only boy out of four kids and his dad died a couple of years ago, so his mom and sisters seem to feel really strongly that he should honor his dad by giving his kids his last name. (The last name will continue through his male cousins though, so it won’t “die out” either way). But his family also recently compared us to the Amish because they think we are so unconventional--i.e., we eat healthily and only have one t.v. that we rarely watch (just to give you some context). Anyway, just wondering if you had to weather any flak from the families about using her last name, and if so, how you dealt with it.

The baby is kicking up a storm these days--yesterday, during and after the inauguration, it was partying like mad! :-)

Love,
T

On Wed., Jan. 21, 2009, at 4:32 p.m., G wrote:

T,

I’m cc’ing M on this; I imagine she’ll want to respond herself.

Here’s what we did: If it was a boy, he’d have had my last name, and since it as a girl, she took M’s. The middle names were picked in part because they sounded echoes of the other parent’s last name. I never heard any flak from any family member, nor really directly from anyone; I don’t recall hearing M tell such war stories, either. But there have been lots of blank stares and double-takes, starting at the hospital when we talked to the (female) hospital or county official (I forget which) about the name for the birth certificate. I imagine all her childhood Baby A will have to confront those who assume “Dad” is not really the dad. I can imagine having to convince school officials, for instance, that I’m actually the father. To me, such inconveniences are entirely worth the modest envelope pushing the naming involved. If no male issue from M and me arrives (and we’ve got no plans), I imagine my direct family “line” might die out, since my brother’s son is gay, and he’s the only option. (Of course, he could adopt. And I’ve got, let’s see, eight male fraternal cousins.) But when I think about it..... who cares? What does it signify, and why, beyond paternal social convention? Why wouldn’t it, for instance, honor your dad to have his grandchild bear your (his) name? (Has he got any other grandchildren coming down the pike?) I don’t have to convince you, I know; it’s just that those arguing the conventional line have no ground to stand on aside from “That’s the way it’s done here” and “Why do you want to be different, you wacky Amish weirdoes?”

It’s funny; I was thinking after I sent you the recent email about our diaper selection process that the one piece of advice I’d give to you and B is: Do things your own way. Do the birth your own way. Do the diapers your own way. Do the child-rearing your own way. Everyone has opinions, and it’s remarkable how invested even strangers can be in you doing things “the best way” or “the real way” or, in short, their way. Test for the baby’s gender; don’t find out until the birth. Drugs during labor or none; ob-gyn or midwife; hospital or home birth. Letting the kid sleep with you; breast feeding for x months; keep a parent at home or get a nanny or go to daycare. On and on and on. People are oddly invested in your choices. M says the only parallel she knows of concerned her cancer treatment, and she thought that had to do with other people making themselves feel better, staking some control over her situation and, thus, indirectly, death. I’m not sure what the emotional stake in other people’s child-rearing is, but it’s palpable. I hear you that the familial flak sucks; we were lucky to avoid it. I won’t offer advice, because you don’t need it. I wish you and B peace and calm and good will around the decision; whatever you do will be done with loving intention, and that’s what matters.

Kick, you little Amish Obama-lovin’ baby, kick!

Love,
G

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 7:32 AM, M wrote:

Dear T,

I am so sorry you are getting blowback for the perspective you and B bring to this issue. I personally don’t know of anyone who has made the decision G and I made. So to have you and B make it would be great! Here’s the way I see it: you and I are pretty well educated. OK, let’s be real: there are few women on the planet who have had more advanced education in feminism and equality. This education is what grants one freedom of conscience, thought, and action. If we can’t make this small, small step, who can, and what hope is there for change? It says too much bad about our world for me to think that people like us would not be able to name a child in a way that swam against the patriarchal tide. I don’t want to live in that world.

I like your diversity argument. I also think about affirmative action when I think about this issue. Isn’t it time a bunch of people mixed it up and named their kids after the female? It would take about a hundred years of a solid minority of folks in the U.S. naming their kids after the mother before people would no longer assume the supremacy of the male line.

One other option that I proposed but G rejected: we each keep our own names and the baby gets a blend. Our blend isn’t bad. G didn’t like it. Your blend wouldn’t be bad, either. (But it won’t satisfy the in-laws, whose name is tragically about to die out. Why they don’t pressure B’s sisters to name their kids in a feminist way to keep the line alive, I just don’t know.)

One thing with us that was funny is that G’s last name sounded much better with just about any first name we chose. We wanted a Gaelic name and I didn’t want an obviously gendered name, regardless of what the baby was. Anything we thought of sounded better with G’s name. But we decided that he would get the males and I would get the females (and any intersex children), and that that division, although imperfect and gendered itself, at least seemed fair in the microcosm. In the macrocosm, there was a 50 percent chance we would never have made any feminist statement via naming, but I was willing to live with it.

So I fear I have now painted myself solidly into the corner of “do things the way we did it” that G warned you about--like so many couples seeking validation of their decisions by encouraging pregnant couples to do the same. So let’s just reject all that! Look, G and I love you both. Whatever you decide is cool. If the pressure is too intense, hey, people have done a lot worse things to their kids to shut up their in-laws! :-) Any name of a new child is a good name. My mom’s family used to joke that one of the girls should have been name Ola Hortense in honor of their two grandmothers. There’s a name!

Good luck in facing this, no matter the decision.
M

On Thurs., Jan. 22, 2009, at 12:38 p.m., T wrote:

G & M,

Thank you both so much for your thoughtful and supportive replies. It’s funny how picking a last name really is a minor thing, but it’s so symbolic that people are very invested in it. Even my mom expressed surprise and concern when she asked what we were doing about the last name (imagining, I suppose, that we would either take B’s name or combine), assuming that I must have railroaded B into this decision with my pushy feminist ways. I suspect that is how B’s family might see it as well, which is probably why I’m struggling with the “good girl” urge to please them. But I am in full agreement with everything you said in favor of using my last name, M. B seems to be on the same page too, but we both agree that it’s sad that either one of us has to be the odd-parent out. We think the boy-gets-his-girl-gets-mine idea is a good one, but if we end up with two kids of different sexes (who knows), we would like them to share the same last name. Anyway, more good food for thought—thanks for listening and responding!

G, your advice to follow our own path is wise. But to be honest I’m having a hard time trusting that we know how to make our own path in this parenting wilderness!! I have been feeling COMPLETELY ignorant about anything baby-related (I knew more about babies in junior high when I babysat all the time--don’t think I’ve changed a diaper since) and, given my anal academic tendencies (okay, I’m also a Virgo), I have been feeling the need to gather information on everything. I don’t really believe that I have any instinctual knowledge of how to care for a baby (hell, I’ve been critiquing essentialist, maternalist ideologies for some 15 years now, so no wonder I don’t think I have any maternal instincts, I’ve theoretically demolished them!). B is more confident that we will do fine, but I sometimes stare at him and feel like shouting, “if we don’t do our studying now, we will NOT do fine!!!” (I’ve made a pile of books for him to read--I think he’s read about 10 pages of one of them, much to my chagrin. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a nightmare right now--saint that he is, he’s dealing with me really well.) Accumulating information is also one of the ways I deal with anxiety, of which I’ve got plenty these days! (Have to just share this: at a conference a couple of months ago I was having a meal with a bunch of friends who are all new parents. One of them was sharing a story about how his baby ate a battery from an alarm clock and it got stuck in her throat and they had to take her to the ER, and I asked totally earnestly why they didn’t just hang her upside down and shake her. Everyone roared and told me I had MUCH to learn before the baby is born!!! I took this very much to heart.)

Some time I would love to have a chat about feminism and motherhood—I do find myself confused a lot these days, caught between my long-held feminist views (which, I must now admit, included some latent denigration of motherhood) and totally new desires and experiences (like, I’m seriously reconsidering pursuing a full-time academic career because I want to prioritize family and don’t want to leave the bay area).... This is all such new terrain: to be out of academia for the time being, to be married, to be pregnant, to be seriously considering alternate life routes to the one I’ve so long imagined! I think I want to be home at least part-time with the baby, and I’m struggling to feel okay about that. It’s like I’ve crafted this whole ediface for my life over the past decade plus, and now I think I might not want to dwell in it!

Okay, enough of true confessions.

Gratitude, love, and admiration to you both,
T

On Thurs., Jan. 22, 2009, at 1:28 p.m., M wrote:

This is just so funny. I love your description of devouring texts in order to shore up what must be a weak/nonexistent maternal instinct. I, too, struggled mightily with stepping into the role of “Mother” that I swore off forever--no takebacks!--in the 8th grade. For what it is worth, here’s what I’ve found: It’s not really a question of maternal instinct. It’s about love, which is evenly distributed. G and I both love Baby A ridiculous amounts. We would do anything for that rabbit. He is as good a parent as I am, and better in many ways. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing when we had a baby but we had a few key resources that I hope you can find: 1) an excellent, overly cautious mensch of a traditional pediatrician who you can call at any time of the day or night, and 2) a funny, skilled midwife that you can call any time of the day or night. They come at every single health issue from the exact opposite places. It helps us stay on the Middle Path. Example: She co-sleeps with kids who are 5 and 7. He subtly encourages what he calls “recreational” breast feeding to wrap up by about 18 months (I am ignoring him). She prescribes grapefruitseed extract for the baby’s thrush; he wants Baby A on a full course of antibiotics. Etc.

Anyway, I’d love to talk with you about the nature/nurture question of motherhood sometime. The one thing that has blown my mind is breastfeeding. Nothing has ever been this much of a pain in the butt (nipple, really) that I love doing. It is Baby A’s favorite thing in the entire universe. That is not an overstatement. She desires and adores my body like no other human ever has. And it never gets old for her. It is always a thing of pure delight. Well, to be that for someone else, in a way that is directly related to gender, just throws a big ol’ wrench in my whole “women and men are equal” thing. Damn. Mind you, I don’t think a lot flows from that biological fact--men aren’t supposed to slay the dragon and women aren’t supposed to clean the toilets as a result, but it is pretty amazing to have a somatic experience of one’s certitudes around gender dissolve, or at least get fuzzy around the edges.



On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 5:54 PM, G wrote:

Hey, T,

You’ve probably heard this before, but trust me: you know way more about babies than you think. I didn’t know squat; I’d never babysat, never been around infants, never changed a diaper in my life. (To tell the truth, I was relieved when we chose disposables since I could avoid folding and pins.) My instinct about the battery story was exactly yours. (I don’t know how far down the kid’s throat the thing was -- presumably it wasn’t completely obstructing her airway.) As our family story goes, my dad once turned my sister upside down, held her by the ankle, thrust his hand down her throat, and plucked out a penny. M’s biggest ongoing fear is that Baby A will choke. But kids seem to have good instincts about what they can tolerate in terms of food intake, and we’ve been lucky to avoid Duracells and loose change.

During M’s pregnancy I didn’t read much beyond babycenter.com’s weekly bulletins, and though I’ve since read a couple of parenting books I can’t say how much has stuck. There are still plenty of things for which I rely on M completely: installing car seats, for instance, or altering straps on the high chair, or just about anything that requires construction or tools. (This has always been true, but it comes up a helluva lot more with a baby around.) And I routinely suffer parental guilt -- should I have put Baby A down to pick up the Times crossword puzzle instead of reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” for the fifth time? But parents have to maintain sanity somehow. And Baby A is, so far as I can tell, just fine: playful, trusting, engaged in the universe, generally likable. So we must be doing something right. I’d have dismissed these words 16 months ago, but now I firmly believe them: if you never read another word, you and B would have everything you need to be successful parents.

Keep breathing.
G.

On Friday, Jan. 23, at 12:45 p.m., T wrote:

I already feel like pregnancy has “thrown a wrench” into my anti-gender-difference viewpoint, M, so I can only imagine what breast feeding will do to it!! But I agree, it’s not that the biological differences themselves matter, it’s the meanings society ascribes to them that matter and the consequences of these meanings (dragon slaying and toilet bowl cleaning). But that sometimes gets confused when you’re battling gender essentialist “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” crap all the time--you just start rejecting biological difference itself!

And thanks for the confidence in our abilities to parent just as we are, G. Since I can believe that is true for OTHER people, like you guys, there might be a chance that I can start believing it’s true for us as well. My family actually has a similar choking story by the way--my brother got a candy stuck in his throat when he was a toddler and my parents dislodged it by shaking him upside down. So I guess it does work--or at least it USED to in the good ole days--but this group of parents didn’t think it was such a good idea, and of course, I assumed they must know!

Did I tell you how much I relished Anne Lamott’s “Operating Instructions?” By far the best book I’ve read so far on parenting...

Love to you both, and to Baby A,
T

The Cleverest Baby in the History of Western Civilization

9:18 p.m. -- 15 months, 14 days

Forgive the 8-month hiatus, for which I offer no excuses. I'm back at work. Baby A is in many ways a different being, though some traits remain unaltered: her precociousness; her desire for order; her quickness both to learn and to become frustrated; her generally sweet nature. At her 15-month checkup last week -- 36 inches (95th percentile), 24.6 pounds (75th percentile, between 25th and 50th percentile for her height), 19-inch head (98th percentile), entirely healthy -- our pediatrician reminded us that at six weeks he'd noted that she was "a baby in a hurry." That clearly hasn't changed.

Not that we're tracking or anything, but as evidence I present a list of the 180 words used (not just repeated) by one 15-month-old child in an early 21st century bourgeois American household. (Typical 19- to 24-month-olds apparently use 50 to 70 words.) At the insistence of my spouse, proper nouns were included in the count; over my spouse's objections, animal sounds were not. (All proper nouns are relatives except "Keith," a friend of our babysitter's whom she's never met but whose name she apparently likes to say.) Listed in the order we remembered them, the words are intended solely for academic study by linguists, anthropologists, aliens, and family members. The first 45 were recorded on 27 Nov., when Baby A was two days shy of 14 months; the remainder were recorded tonight. Most she has pronounced correctly, though she struggles with "L"s and "R"s and truncates the majority of the polysyllabics ("dishwasher" = "dish-a-sha", "harmonica" = "mon-ih-ka"). But her meaning, at least to caregivers, is lucid. On a couple of occasions she's turned the trick of combining two words: "Mommy nurse" is her favorite sentence.

Oh, yeah: she's also made sign language signs for "more," "gentle," and "sharing," and she's spoken nine letters: B, E, A, O, W, X, Y, D, T.

For sticklers, "duckity" is a family game quite distinct from the noun "duck"; the game's linguistic origins have been obscured by the mists of time.

Hot, hat, heat, cat (meow), baby, daddy, mommy, nose, eye, ear.
Doggie (arf), duckie (quack), bus, more, milk, uh-oh, me, meat, clock, car.
Yucky, yummy, no, bird, buddha, mouth, this, that, these, ball.
Duckity, cookie, geese, down, poop, book, biscuit, toast, you, mole.
Knee, cow (moo), shoes, up, pee.
Hi, bye, chin, cheek, toes, Adrienne, Joseph, Bella, Garrett, feet.
Help, nurse, nipple, boobie, strawberry, carrot, rice, juice, tea.
Ice cream, soup, gas, open, tubbie, oatmeal, smoothie, paper, red, truck.
Butterfly, caterpillar, pumpkin, basket, water, apple, socks, diaper, beef, fish.
Banana, rose, broccoli, happy, bear, music, dancing, monster, gloves, coat.
Yellow, slippers, boots, dishwasher, dish, laundry, lion (roar), monkey (ooo-ooo), sheep (baa), pig (oink).
Clothes, pants, shirt, Craisin, hair, head, we, pen, cup, train (choo-choo).
Tummy, kisses, blanket, drink, muffin, one, two, three, four, five.
Cold, hand, fingers, thumb, ring, sun, bowl, moon, stars, shoulder.
Elbow, flower, some, yawning, fan, bless you, yogurt, button, light, hurray.
Walk, keys, teeth, tongue, go, gate, wall, lemon, popsicle, tractor.
Bead, box, tree, harmonica, drum, owl, bee, zebra, Keith, tampon.
Gentle, beard, phone, laughing, green, circle, on, off, shampoo, bottle.
Snow, penis, shower, splashing, bed.

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.

Development II -- Crawling

6:34 a.m. -- 7 months, 1 day

When M was pregnant, we pondered what would happen if our child developed our worst traits. Combining M's tendency toward rigidity with my inclination to delay, we decided, would create one worst-case scenario: a militant procrastinator.

"A militant procrastinator?" said our brother-in-law J, who directs a social justice agency. "That's me!" We could do a lot worse than create another J, so we moved on to other concerns.

Baby A wasn't long in the world when we realized she'd developed another trait that each of her parents unproudly possesses: impatience, especially with herself. Most observers agree the kid is a quick study, but you can't tell her that. The moment she realizes there's a skill she wants but hasn't mastered, then Katie bar the door, for the tantrums will surely follow.

Exhibit A: Baby A wants to move, but she's not sure how the crawling thing works. These days, nothing turns her infant joy to rage faster than the frustration of limited motility.

Perhaps it's her parents' fault. Another possibly difficult inheritence for the child will be her father's clumsy fine-motor coordination, which renders almost impossible such tasks as buttoning tiny buttons or inserting tiny tabs of toddler arms into skinny slots of toddler sleeves. Wanting to spare both me and Baby A painful moments of garment wrestling, M has from Day 1 provided a wardrobe consisting almost entirely of onesies, which among their advantages are easy to snap and remove.

But keeping the kid in footie pajamas 24 hours a day prevents her from gripping the world's surfaces with her toes, which makes crawling slippery.

Then there's our desire to keep the kid well herded, which means she spends long minutes either in her secure playpen or in the one area of the house not covered with hardwood floors: the carpeted sunroom we call, by virtue of its most prominent feature, the Buddha room. For adults, it features lots of low furniture like floor cushions. (We don't spend much time with the grandparents out there.) This means that Baby A's prime crawling space often features her father sprawled on the floor nearby, his head propped on a cushion.

As a result, Baby A has become exceptionally good at climbing and standing. She'll be on her hands and knees, ready to move. Then she'll see me, and rather than keep her limbs on the ground she uses her strong legs to frog-hop onto my body, where she practices rock-climbing moves on my limbs, torso, and face.

She wants to be vertical, glorying in her ability to push or pull herself up, hands placed flat on my torso or some other low surface, pleased no matter how tottery, oblivious to hovering parental hands ready to arrest her tumbles. The other day she pulled herself upright from a sitting position using only the edge of a low glass table (which we've covered with thick, taped towels but which remains dangerous enough to alarm her father): her best stand yet.

But crawling? Not so much. Perhaps it's because she has no role models. I try to demonstrate, but I can't even tell if crawling involves moving one's hands and knees in opposition, as in walking, or together (left-left, right-right). It sort of works either way, and my crawling instincts are shot. And I keep forgetting to watch when I meet other toddlers. Maybe there's an instructional video on the Net. In any case, Baby A watches my lumbering around the carpet with engagement but no obvious benefit.

Of all the toys in the Buddha room, the stuffed monkeys and bandy-legged giraffes and vibrating elephants and candy-colored rattles, Baby A's favorites are the plastic rings used to attach them to the playpen frame. So yesterday, while sitting and conducting a favorite experiment -- testing a ring's air resistance by using her right arm to shake it vigorously through the atmosphere -- she mistakenly hurled the ring out of reach.

Wanting the experiment to continue, she turned toward the ring, dropped to her hands and knees, and without a second's hesitiation crawled forward two-and-a-half paces before grabbing it, sitting, and restarting the shake test. I startled her by cheering and applauding, my joy checked only by my annoyance that I hadn't noticed if she'd moved her limbs oppositionally. Delighted that I enjoyed her ring-resistance research as much as she, she redoubled her efforts.

A few minutes later, her attention was engaged by a distant cloth rattle shaped like a pig's face. (Don't ask.) This time, after dropping to her hands and knees, she made the fatal mistake of thinking. She considered her next step, butt rocking back and forth. How the hell does this work? It makes no intuitive sense whatsoever. Why can't the toys just bring themselves to me?

Finally she lowered her head, pushed off on her arms, kicked her legs, moved two paces backward, looked up, noticed her regression, dropped her hips and head to the ground, and began to wail.

Her rage could have concerned the absence of the distant toy. But, speaking as one well practiced in self recrimination, I thought I knew better. Not that my knowledge proved any consolation to either of us.

I've got to go find a crawling how-to video.

Quick Check-up

6:34 p.m. -- 7 months

Baby A saw our pediatrician this morning. She hates him as much as ever, if not more, freaking out as soon as her back touched his examination table and not stopping until she was certain the nightmare was over.

She also didn't take to a painless eye exam, crying so much that the eye not wearing a pirate patch was closed too often for the nurse to gauge how often she looked at animated animals on a computer screen. So we'll have to try that again next visit.

But the kid has no cause for concern, since the doc says her progress is "like clockwork."

She's 28 inches long (95th percentile), 19 pounds and 6 ounces (90th percentile), and her head is 18-1/2 inches around (again off the charts).

The big news: she gets to end her all-cereal diet and begin to eat fruits this month. We'll start on bananas and progress from there. By the time we see him again in two months, he says she can be eating not just vegetables but meat. Since M's post-partum food allergies began, we do bring chicken into the house. But we've never bought red meat (or pork or veal, etcetera); I wonder if Baby A will alter our shopping and dining habits.

Development I -- Syllables

5:09 a.m. -- 6 mos., 26 days

Almost too much going on with Baby A these days to recount, almost all of it more typical of infant growth from 8-12 months. As our pediatrician said a few months back, she's a baby in a hurry. We'll try to summarize a few major developments in the next few days, in descending order of parental pleasure (or ascending order of parental annoyance).

Three weeks ago, Baby A awoke in an unusually good mood and, sitting on M's chest, declared "Ah-di-bah" -- the first time she'd put consonants together with vowels. We exulted. She noted our response, and she's hardly shut up since.

"I'm shocked," said my unwontedly ironic mother, "that a child growing up with you two as parents would think that talking was important."

It's true: Baby A is not growing up in a household of the taciturn. And it's true that we've encouraged her vocalizations from Day 1, spending long minutes with our faces inches from hers, cooing, babbling, howling, imitating. Whether this has paid off depends upon your tolerance for infants saying "Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya" for 10 minutes at a stretch.

We particularly like the moments when she practices sotto voce. From across the room you can see her jaw moving up and down rapidly, like she's chewing gum. Up close, you'll hear her whisper "Chuh chuh chuh chuh. Chuh chuh chuh chuh." Then, after the private recital, she'll decide the sound is ready for public utterance: "Chuh! Chuh chuh chuh!"

The short "a" sound (as in "mama" and "dada") must be the easiest to say, since it's her standard vowel. A couple of weeks ago she was sitting on M's lap at the breakfast table when M pointed me out: "That's your daddy. Da-da." Immediately, Baby A said, "Da da da da da."

Cue double takes and dropped utensils. Was this her first word? Was she even more of a genius than we have not-so-secretly wished for?

She smiled at me. "Da da da da."

M was certain she was connecting sound to idea: "She knows! She's doing it!"

"Da da da da."

When do kids start speaking, anyway?

"Da da da da da."

"There's your mommy," I said. "Ma-ma."

"Da da da da da."

"M's are harder to say than d's and b's," I consoled. "I've heard 'Da-da' is a typical first word."

"Da da da da da."

When Baby A settled for her morning nap, her parents contemplated early university admission programs.

I decided to spend the day with her practicing both "Dada" and "Mama," with sign language gestures for each, to surprise her mother when she got home from work.

But, despite guidance ranging from enthusiastic to exasperated to unhinged, since that morning Baby A has not in my hearing uttered the "da" syllable one time.

She loves the vowel sound, but, like a capricious kid at the height of a playground fad for yo-yos, she tried the "D" consonant, enjoyed it, and dropped it. She probably looks at us, babbling "Da-da, Da-da," the way hip kids view the nerds still trying "Walk The Dog" and "Around The World" months after everyone has moved on to skateboards or "High School Musical" or the latest Nintendo craze. "Y" is clearly the syllable of the moment.

I knew my kid would make me feel hopelessly old and out-of-touch and uncool. I just didn't imagine it would happen in her sixth month.

Opening Day

5:23 a.m. -- 6 mos., 17 days

My sister told her boss that she was going to the Mets' final opening day at Shea Stadium with her brother and 6-month-old niece.

"Six months?" her boss said. "The kid'll last two innings."

We'll show him, I thought.

M said our first priority would be to keep Baby A alive. I told her that, given our seats, the chance of death by foul ball was remote but that nevertheless I would watch diligently. I added that I would equally protect our child from testosterone- and alcohol-addled fans.

"You won't get in any fights?" she said. I assured her my conduct would meet Gandhian standards.

"Just bring her back in one piece," she said.

We'll show her, I thought.

I've been acculturating her to baseball from the start. In her first month, back in October, she often fell asleep listening to the playoffs and World Series. She loves my San Francisco Giants cap. (Though, truth be told, she seems to love almost any piece of headgear worn by her parents.) I've been singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" for weeks. We do the "Charge!" call almost every time she has a dirty diaper, though we substitute the word "Poop!" I've even learned to play on our mini-xylophone the Jose Reyes theme song. ("Jose, JoseJoseJose, Jose, Jose.")

Baby A had been to Shea a couple of times last year, in utero, and I seem to recall that she'd responded well. Since birth, she'd gone on lots of outings, though not many with just one parent. Still, my sister would be there to help.

I packed the diaper bag with blanket, Snuggli, extra outfit, two pacifiers, enough diapers for the direst contingency, and the tiny S.F. Giants cap that was her first gift. (From my brother, the hardest of die-hard Giants fans.) Worried our large collapsable stroller wouldn't fit under the seats, I went out the night before the game and paid $20 for a more compact, if flimsy, model. We were good to go.

The plan was to walk the half-mile to our local Long Island Railroad station, then meet my sister at the park. Baby A has ridden the train plenty of times, always either sleeping or looking happily out a window. I planned it so her naptime would come as we boarded the train. I fed her some cereal and left with plenty of time to spare.

Baby A didn't seem to like her initial fitting into the stroller -- maybe its canvas seat bothered her, or its less reclined tilt. But she settled down, and we started off down our steep neighborhood hill. The stroller's wheels veered unaccountably, first to one side and then the next. But no bother. Then, three-quarters of the way down, my brain running through a list of contingencies, I realized I'd forgotten one thing: milk. Criminey. I reversed course and ran up the hill as fast as I could, the stroller rattling and swerving. Baby A seemed rattled herself, but she stayed quiet.

I ran into the house, grabbed two bottles from the fridge, stuffed them in the bag, and set off again. Ten minutes to train time. The walk took ten minutes. I tried to run down the hill, but the stroller careened wildly. Baby A started to fuss. My thigh muscles pulsed, but I kept my clip as steady as the stroller would allow. The day was cool, but sweat pooled in the small of my back.

When we got the station in sight and my heart rate slowed, Baby A decided to break into a full-fledged squawl. She kept it up as walked along the platform past a gauntlet of Mets fans. We happened to walk behind a lone man wearing the jersey of the Phillies, the Mets' opening day opponent. At least five people decided it would be funny to mention that my child must object to his jersey.

We found an open spot on the platform, and she settled down once I stopped panting and removed her from the stroller. The train pulled up, and we sat at the front of a car in the space for wheelchairs. Baby A didn't want to return to her rickety new contraption, but she sat in my lap happily enough.

Then, as more fans poured in at each station, she began to fuss. I stood, but there was no way to move to a window. The car was packed. Faces loomed over and around us. Mewling turned to bawling. Bouncing and singing solved nothing. She kept rubbing her face on my shoulder, her signal for extreme fatigue. But with too little movement and no music, she wouldn't go to sleep. "Must be a Phillies fan," someone said. I smiled thinly. After a longish quarter-hour, the train pulled into the Shea station.

"Any elevators?" I asked a railroad employee on the platform. Nope. A woman behind me offered to carry the empty stroller up the long flight of stairs. I thanked her profusely. "I'm a grandmother," she said, shrugging. On the ramp to the stadium Baby A settled back into the stroller, looking sleepy and stunned.

We negotiated two more flights of stairs, as I found one of the crappy stroller's few benefits: it lifted easily with her in it. As we waited for my sister I rolled the stroller furiously, hoping she'd drop off, but there was too much activity: the parade of fans, MTA employees with bullhorns telling people to buy return tickets, a police dog barking at the bullhorn user.

My sister arrived, and we walked to Gate D to find a massive line created by security's need to search bags and wand patrons. Baby A sat calmly for a while, but as we inched forward and the crowd pressed closer she began to cry. I picked her up and we folded the stroller. Baby A rubbed her eyes and sobbed occasionally. The sun broke through the clouds, and I fumbled in the bag for her Giants cap. I pulled it on, tugged, adjusted -- too small. Baby A began to cry steadily.

The crowd grew denser. The line barely moved. I was sweating again. I thought Baby A might be drifting off when a couple of military jets did the obligatory Opening Day flyover. The crowd roared. Baby A began to give it her full-throated best.

I decided to stand by a couple of cops, away from the crowd at the line's edge. She immediately calmed, though her eyes remained open. A nice cop let us walk through the barriers once my sister arrived at the front of the line. We headed through the turnstiles just as the first pitch was being thrown. OK. Things would be fine once we reached the seats.

We inched past a half-dozen fans into our seats. We sat in the mezzanine reserved level, just under the concrete roof of the upper deck -- good for rain delays, bad for noise. Worse, a speaker sat just above our heads; the public address announcer's every syllable reverberated in our brains. A trio of large young men sat to my immediate left, with, I was dismayed to note, booming voices. Baby A looked fretful.

The stroller fit under the seats reasonably well, but the diaper bag was stuffed at my feet, pressed against the seat in front. The Phils had a couple of men on base. My sister went to get hot dogs. I decided a bottle might put Baby A to sleep. She sucked for a second, and then Oliver Perez dropped in a strike-three curve on Pat Burrell for the third out: bedlam. Baby A paused, then opened her mouth and wailed.

She'd just about settled down by the time my sister returned with the dogs and an $8 beer. But Opening Day crowds are not filled with quiet, contemplative fans, awaiting slow-building moments of baseball drama. They're jacked up, screaming at every pitch. At one point -- I think Luis Castillo had just drawn a one-out walk in the bottom of the first -- my bellicose neighbor issued a full-throated "Hell yeah!" I tapped on his arm and indicated Baby A, who'd responded with a fresh round of screaming. He laughed with delight.

For a couple of minutes in the top of the second, Baby A seemed to calm down. But her eyes were wide open and glazed; she looked comatose. The yells seemed to have no effect. I'd never seen her like that. I checked: she was still breathing. I shook her gently: she moved her head, but her eyes stayed glassy. Then the Mets turned a double-play; the crowd erupted, turning Baby A's mini-coma to a fresh round of screams. I decided to head for the concourse to find some relative peace.

As it turns out, even in its farthest recesses, Shea Stadium is a loud place. We stood on a ramp overlooking the parking lot, but a thoughtfully placed loudspeaker kept us attuned to the p.a. announcer, whose between-innings prattling was far worse than his announcements of each batter. I found a family restroom and changed her diaper. Baby A cried the whole time, drowning out the loudest version of the diaper song I'd ever attempted.

I moved to another section of ramp -- another loudspeaker. A steady stream of fans came out to smoke. Three different people said it was great that I was taking my boy to his first game. Carlos Delgado hit a homer, and the crowd roar sent Baby A into another paroxysm.

I moved half-way up a ramp leading to the upper deck, sitting on the hard concrete in the sunshine, as far away from the smokers as I could manage. Baby A wouldn't lie still. I gave her a bottle; she pulled for one second, then opened her mouth and let the milk drip down her chin. She'd never refused milk. I put the bottle away, stood up, and bounced her until she seemed to head toward sleep. But as soon as I returned to our section, she again began to shake and sob.

I told my sister I needed to leave, and though it was the top of the fourth inning, she gamefully said she'd come with us. We headed down the ramp, and by the time we'd descended a couple of levels Baby A fell asleep. "Why don't I take her and you can watch a couple of innings?" she said. So she stood on a field level ramp, Baby A sleeping fitfully on her shoulder, and I stood in an aisle and watched the Mets scratch out another run in the bottom of the fourth. But I hardly enjoyed it, walking back down the ramp between batters to see if they were OK.

So we put Baby A back in the stroller and headed home. As soon as we got outside the stadium she awoke, apparently refreshed and happy. We had a long wait for the train, but Baby A bobbled happily in my sister's arms. She was delightful for the entire train ride, and cried only briefly on the walk home. She'd never been so happy to walk in our front door. Then she enjoyed a lovely afternoon in her playroom while my sister and I chatted and listened to the radio as the Mets bullpen fell apart.

When the seventh-inning stretch rolled around, I decided, churlishly, not to sing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame."

I've been to 400 or 500 baseball games in my life, and this was my first Opening Day. It also marked the third time in my life that I've left any game before the final out: once when I was 11 (and the game was completed in the 19th inning the next day); once when my prospective father-in-law insisted on beating the post-game traffic; and then Baby A's first game, when I saw about nine batters.

She sure showed me.

Milk

5:04 a.m. -- 5 mos., 25 days

Baby A eats solid food. That is, if you can define milky rice cereal as "solid."

For weeks she's been gazing at our forks and spoons and wine glasses with murderous intent. She doubtless could have eaten sooner, but our pediatrician was concerned about M's food allergies and our family histories of diabetes. But last week he decided it was time, so for the past three days she has begun wolfing with unadorned delight a tablespoon of rice flakes drenched in three tablespoons of formula. Mouth agape, arms aflail, tremblingly awaiting her tiny spoon, she looks like a ravenous baby bird.

Last night she sat for the first time in her highchair at our dinner table. She was most pleased at the development, banging her multicolored plastic cups on her new white plastic tray with vim.

Though breast milk is no longer Baby A's sole means of sustenance, this doesn't seem to have reduced its significance. Both M's visiting mother and I have had an easier time feeding with a spoon than M. Her proximity apparently leads Baby A to conflate the "food" and "boobie" categories, and she loses focus on the milky cereal and whines for her first and best food source, the nipple.

And the development hasn't meant the demise of the unholy troika of all working mothers seeking to limit formula intake: pumping, freezing, and reheating. Keeping Baby A in breast milk has taken an inordinate amount of parental attention, and the moment our reliance upon it promises to diminish seems an opportunity for reflection.

My recreational drug use is long behind me, but nothing calls to mind the activity of scrambling for every last twig and seed of your quarter-ounce like storing and using breast milk.

For starters, there's the baggie. For a while we were using the breast pump manufacturer's Official Storage Devices, specially demarcated with ounce measurements, made of unusually thick plastic, and costing about 50 cents a pop. Then we realized that we could save about 49 cents by using a regular, thin, undemarcated baggie with a twist tie. So we spend a lot of time opening, sealing, twisting, and unrolling devices designed to store sandwiches but that do a fine job storing liquid.

I can't empathize, but I have some idea what M endures to provide the 8 ounces or so of pumped milk we give Baby A on a typical day. She's lucky in that she has her own office. But in an hour she might get three or four visitors, and few are likely to be unstartled by the sight of a plastic suction device attached to the boss's breast. So she has to secure blocks of her day for the sole purpose of using a machine that, despite droning like a Roto-Rooter pump at full throttle, packs much less punch than Baby A's lips.

The pump comes in a sleek black backpack and has new-fangled plastic tubing, but the 21st century design belies its reliance on 19th century engineering. It requires at least one hand to secure its balky cone-and-bottle recepticle, making it impossible to type or do any work more arduous than a phone call. Removed from the context of suckling and nurturance and human warmth, the pump reduces the magic of breast feeding to its mechanical process, while reducing its users to milk producers -- to feeling like, not to put too fine a point on it, cows on a factory farm.

And let's not even talk about the (needless but apparently unavoidable) guilt that many working moms feel about infant abandonment, of which the pump becomes a portable symbol, fully self-contained.

Compared to the operation that produces it, my job of storing and pouring shouldn't be a big deal. But knowing that every drop has extracted a physical and psychic toll on the woman who provided it tends to ratchet up the pressure. And for a man whose stubby fingers have never displayed anything like nimbleness, not to say grace, the process of transferring frozen milk into bottles for Baby A has had its frenzied moments.

Few of the following tasks would be troublesome under normal circumstances, even for an acknowledged klutz. But the proximity of a hungry, squawling infant changes the equation. I recall in detail only a couple of the incidents required to learn the lessons delineated below. But in broad outline, problem areas include:

-- Defrosting. Remember: baggies can develop holes. Best to defrost them in a bowl, where leaks can be contained.

-- Heating. I put the partially defrosted baggie in a large tea cup filled with steaming water from our tap. (At some point in Baby A's development we'll need to turn down the water heater.) While dunking or testing baggies for frozen milk chunks, scalded fingers are routine.

-- Untwisting and unrolling the baggie. Virtually impossible, repeated experiments have proven, with one arm. Possible results include milk dripping, splashing, or gushing onto countertops and into sinks, where desparate attempts to recapture the spreading droplets remain unavailing. (Sponge soaking and squeezing are, it turns out, ineffective as well as unhygenic.)

-- Pouring from the baggie into a bottle. Re one-armed pouring: See above. Even with arms empty of baby (cue screaming from the crib), it helps to place a bowl beneath the open bottle to catch random rivulets rushing from unexpected baggie sections.

-- Screwing on the bottle top. Nothing like dumping an ounce of milk onto the baby's chest to teach this lesson.

I suppose it would be possible to calculate the number of hard-pumped ounces that have dribbled into our drainage system or Baby A's onesies rather than her digestive tract.

But who's counting?

Learning To Crawl

7:11 a.m. -- 5 mos., 15 days

Golf courses aside, Baby A has always enjoyed sitting in her stroller, which we take around our neighborhood at least once and usually twice a day. So it was a surprise this week when, two days and three walks in a row, she fussed most of the trip.

There's nothing like walking past your neighbors with a squawling baby to raise your parental defenses. No, no, I protest as faces turn with a mix of pity and empathy or, more often, concern. She's not usually like this. She's a happy baby, honest. Our pediatrician says she's thriving. I'm a competent father, I swear.

Thus, after three walks filled not with the joy of budding spring but infant wails and paternal chagrin, I was willing to experiment.

Standard winter walk wear for Baby A has been a snow suit over her onesie and then to be swaddled in her favorite green blanket. But every day she's becoming more physically independent. I.e., she can sit for 15 minutes without toppling. When lying on her back she loves to thrash all four limbs for minutes on end. And, as she becomes aware of her ability to move and her sense of personal space expands, she's been doing full-body dolphin thrusts toward objects she wants, either from a lying or sitting position.

This last maneuver means she's no longer safe except in the precise middle of our bed. I came back from a toothbrushing break to discover her not sitting demurely where I'd left her but lying on her tummy next to a rattle, hands at bed's edge in push-up position, head raised, grinning at her new trick. Yikes.

The dolphin thrusts are clearly an evolutionary step toward crawling. On our bed yesterday morning, M put Baby A on her tummy and pressed her hands against her little feet. Sure enough, Baby A put her hands in push-up position, lifted her head, looked toward me, and generated enough leg force to move her hips forward, tumbling onto her face before peeking up with a smile. She did this about a half-dozen times and was delighted.

And she was furious later in the day when she tried the trick on her own. Without something to push off, her legs just slid on the carpet and she stayed in place. This was an outrage the likes of which she'd never experienced. The time has come. Baby A wants to move.

So on a blustery afternoon I decided to deviate from our stroller swaddling routine. We'd learned this from pediatrician Harvey Karp's five S technique to calm under-3-month-olds. Swaddling was part of the magic (plus putting her on her side, suckling, shushing, shaking) that could quiet her tantrums. And though we haven't much needed the full five S's since her last airplane ride, Baby A had always liked being securely tucked into her stroller.

This time, I tucked the blanket around her torso and legs while leaving her arms free. I was certain she'd knock out her pacifier and make herself more miserable. But I was desperate. Baby A's walks have been my saving grace, one of only two ways I can get her to nap. If our strolls became a torment, I'd be dancing around our house to rock music non-stop. My thighs ached just thinking about it.

We launched out, and immediately Baby A began to flail her arms so hard that one of her hands popped out of the snow suit, which has fold-over sleeves to keep her hands covered. But the kid was burbling, not screaming, so I was hardly going to break our momentum.

One block later, we passed a young Chinese woman carrying groceries. She stopped in her tracks, a look of horror her face. "Baby cold," she said. "Baby cold!"

"Yes," I said. "She certainly hates being cold."

The woman struggled for words. She moved her arms as if to bundle up. "Blanket," I think she said. "Poor baby. Baby cold."

"Yes," I said, striding past. "Have to keep walking. Can't have the baby getting cold."

I didn't glance back for another half-block, and the woman was gone. But she'd worried me enough to stop and refold the snow suit over Baby A's hand, which was indeed chilled. "You OK?" I asked.

There was no need. Baby A grinned, then squinted and turned her head sideways in the gesture that means the world is almost too delightful to bear. Sleeve adjusted, we marched on, with attentive head turns but barely a peep from the stroller. After a while the head turns slowed. We went the long way, and when we got home she stayed asleep for another 30 minutes.

Neighbors be damned: baby arms are meant to be free.

Babysitting

6:21 a.m. -- 5 mos., 12 days

M had a work retreat late last week, a two-day gathering of 25 of her peers (division leaders, mostly) and corporate brass at a conference center about an hour out of the city. We decided the best strategy was for Baby A and me to tag along, so M wouldn't have to shuttle back and forth or worry about pumping breast milk in the midst of meetings.

This worked just fine for M and Baby A.

We arrived the night before the retreat began. The large hotel, which includes a 9-hole golf course and tennis complex, was institutional and anodyne. Whatever leftover childhood excitement I have about hotel stays was, as usual, wiped away in the first 30 minutes, with the realization that the shower, mattress, and food were inferior to ours at home.

Not to mention Baby A's entertainment options. We'd brought a couple of favorite rattles and books, but the array -- as well as our ability to change environments when she got bored -- was limited.

But no worries. It was only for a couple of nights. Plus, meal times promised me some adult company for a change. M had checked with her bosses, and they'd assured her that Baby A and I would be most welcome at all of the non-business gatherings.

We awoke hungry on the retreat's first day and ordered room service. About an hour later the three of us went down to where the attendees were gathering for a pre-meeting breakfast. M carried Baby A, who as usual attracted admirers and adorers. I introduced myself to a couple of division leaders.

"So you're taking care of the baby for a couple of days?" one asked.

"That's my current job, actually," I said, explaining about the semester off.

"That's funny," the other said. "We were just talking about the definition of 'work.'"

"Well," I said, "what I do every day doesn't exactly engage higher-level brain function, but I'd certainly define it as work."

They smiled vaguely and didn't respond. I shifted. Then M needed me to take Baby A for a minute, and after some more infant admiring I retreated with her back to our room.

For some reason, Baby A hated the golf course. I'd thought it would be a perfect place to stroll, closed to golfers for the winter but with cart paths that accommodated our stroller. But she wailed for more than half of our 45-minute walk, undiverted by the ducks, geese, bridges, and manicured, marshy fairways, before falling into a fitful sleep. She was fussy again when she woke up. I was glad when lunch rolled around.

A long line awaited us at the impressively arrayed buffet table. I chatted with a guy who was running sound for the retreat. I should have known from his first comment that he wasn't connected to M's company, when he admired my Chuck Taylors. Nice guy.

By the time M and I got through the line, most of the tables were filled. I walked over to two vacant chairs and sat down.

Sorry, I was told, another vice president is sitting here.

I stood up. Plate in hand, I moved to the center of the room. A division leader, who's in my field and whom I'd met at a couple of professional conferences, walked past.

"So you're here babysitting?" he said.

"Umm, I guess you could say that."

"Well, good to see you."

The staffer organizing the retreat saw us standing awkwardly. (Someone else was dandling Baby A at one of the tables.) Here, she said, you guys can sit at this table.

I sat down.

Sorry, someone said, the CEO's sitting there.

I stood up.

The staffer apologized. We'll get someone to add a couple of chairs, she said. Just wait a minute.

Either sensing my discomfort or feeling uncomfortable herself, M said, "Forget it. We'll just go back to the room."

Which we did. M grabbed the baby, and I carried her plate. "That's the last time I'm doing that," I said. "That was humiliating."

"I'm sorry," M said, abashed. "She told me there'd be plenty of room."

"Yeah, whatever."

M had to return to the buffet to grab silverware. When she returned, she said the staffer had apologized to her again and told her they were bringing more chairs.

"Forget it," I said.

We ate in stony silence. Baby A played happily on the mattress.

The incident caused a bit of kerfluffle. Apparently the hotel had put us in a lunch space that failed to accommodate the size of the retreat; we weren't the only ones without seats. The retreat organizer told the CEO, who apologized to M personally and reiterated that her husband and baby were more than welcome at all future meals. The organizer told M repeatedly that I should certainly come to the evening reception and dinner. During our afternoon golf course stroll (we went the opposite way, from Hole 9 to Hole 1; Baby A cried about half the time), the hotel staff left a message on our phone apologizing for the mistake and ensuring us that we would have sufficient space at any future meal.

I passed.

"Imagine," I said to M as she changed for the reception. "You come to your husband's company retreat, caring for our baby. You're invited to the meals, but there's a similar fuck up. You get asked if you're the 'babysitter.' There's no other reason for you to be there. You feel conflicted enough about giving up your career. Would you want to swallow hard, smile, and hang out with my colleagues?"

M said she understood. She took Baby A to the reception. I swam laps and sat in the sauna, ate dinner by myself, then watched movies in the room and put Baby A to sleep. The next day, I ate room service while M took Baby A to breakfast. During our morning walk, Baby A cried for more than four holes. I requested that we leave after the last meeting and skip lunch, which M kindly did. We drove home.

Next time, I said, I'll let you bring the breast pump.

Decrepitude

6:42 a.m. -- 4 mos., 30 days

When M was pregnant, a friend asked if I realized that, when our baby graduated from high school, I'd be in my early 60s.

Yeah, I said, I was aware of that.

He asked, Don't you feel old to be having a first child?

Not really, I said. Lots of people -- Westerners, anyway -- have babies in their 40s. It's not such a big deal. It's not like I was ready to have a baby two decades ago. And it's not like I'm Tony Randall, who left behind 8- and 6-year-old children when he died at the sprightly age of 84.

Then Baby A was born.

One sleep deprived morning a few weeks later, when we were still being awakened every two hours, I asked my mother-in-law how she had managed her household, which at one point featured four children under the age of 7.

She never thought much about it at the time, she said. It was the 1960s, and lots of families were of similar size.

"Besides," she said, "I was in my 20s. I had a lot of energy."

I am 44. My energy flags. I feel old.

Much of it is the five-month experiment in sleep deprivation. As the chief diaper changer, I'm the one hopping in and out of bed throughout the night. Still, I suffer no delusion that I am more taxed than M, who breast feeds Baby A at all hours and, far more attuned to her nighttime rhythms, awakens when the kid so much as coughs.

At this point, Baby A regularly sleeps four to six hours when she's put down. But she goes to bed around 8 o'clock, meaning her first wake-up time comes around 1 a.m., just when we've settled into our first sleep cycle. Then she wakes about every three hours. And she likes to rise early.

On the good nights, her cries rouse me gently from a light dream state, to which a few stress-free moments later I happily return.

Last night was more typical. After a cranky evening she'd finally gone down around 8 p.m. We retired at 11. I was traveling deep in my subconscious -- a submarine? a steel mill? -- when Baby A roused me in her full-voiced thrash mode: limbs flailing, back arching, cries piercing. The clock read 1:14 a.m.

I tottered up, lifted her, and stumbled to the changing station, where I was annoyed to note that the diaper was practically dry. My mumbling of the Diaper Change song failed to soften her wails; increasing my volume only urged her to do likewise. I blew on her -- sometimes this makes her pee, which can relieve me from another change in an hour's time -- to no avail. I wiped, grabbed a diaper, and spent 20 seconds trying to find the velcro straps, only to realize that I'd put the thing on upside down.

Now Baby A was really howling. "What's wrong?" M asked.

"Nothing." I reversed the diaper, picked Baby A up, stumbled to M's side of the bed, and rolled her onto M's breast. She immediately settled down, but my brain was by now awake enough to spend a good 30 minutes wandering through a store of anxieties before drifting back to sleep. Baby A slept all the way until 5, but after that change she was wide awake, and I got to babysit for 90 minutes before returning her to M and turning to my computer.

By now I believe I'm accustomed to my perpetual state of mildly disturbed consciousness. And I count myself lucky -- I'm not working, and I don't have to use high-level brain functions routinely. (Not that I wouldn't mind being called to do so more often.) Plus, every couple of days I take the chance to lie on the kitchen floor next to Baby A's downstairs crib, put the boppie pillow under my head, throw her traveling blanket over my torso, and catch a few winks while she takes her afternoon nap.

Now the problem is less with my brain than with my bones -- specifically, a bone in my left wrist. As Baby A has gained weight (at last measure, almost 17 pounds), she's taking more of a toll on my carrying arm. Plus she's stronger and more likely to wriggle free, meaning one-armed carrying has to involve a firm wrist wrap so the left hand can secure her butt.

After several weeks of near-constant tweaking, my left wrist has given out. Even just turning my empty arm in front of my torso at a 90-degree angle shoots pain through the wrist.

M felt the bone a couple of nights ago and thought it felt "frayed" compared to my right wrist bone; she thinks I've fractured it somehow. This strikes me as hyperbolic; it seems more like some carpal tunnel variant.

Then again, she's right that I see doctors only when she's complained so often that I fear her wrath.

Holding her in my right arm isn't a long-term solution. I'm primarily right-handed, and it's awkward to lose my dominant hand. And she doesn't tuck comfortably into that arm; within seconds she slides down my torso, and I'm constantly rehoisting and readjusting. I've been doing a lot of two-armed carrying, but that prevents any other activity when she's in my arms, which renders too much of my day unproductive.

So every morning the wrist feels a bit worse. Every morning I commit to not carrying her in my left arm. And every morning by 10 I'm carrying her in my left arm. I feel like a ballplayer grinding through a six-month season, knowing a couple of rest days might help him heal but determined not to skip a game. I need a sub, a back-up, a designated carrier.

Yesterday, in the homestretch of our morning walk, we passed a trim, 50-something man jogging in the opposite direction. "How's it going?" I asked. "Feeling old," he said, though he was neither sweating nor panting.

I haven't jogged since Baby A's birth; our twice daily walks are nice, but they do little for either my cardiovascular health or my waistline. This guy, at least 10 years my senior, could run me into the ground. I was pushing the stroller with one arm, my left dangling to give it a breather. I felt vaguely pathetic.

"I hear you," I said. "Feeling a little old myself."

The man laughed politely. He didn't know the half of it.

Paper

6:54 a.m. -- 4 mos., 23 days

If personality is indicated, at least in part, by a person's preferences, every day we witness further developments in Baby A's. To wit:

Baby A loves paper.

Yesterday, opening a letter with her in my arms, I made the mistake of handing her the empty envelope. Eyes widening, she grabbed it like a ravenous animal tearing into carrion. Within seconds, it was shredded and crumpled, with bits of it stuffed in her mouth and sodden pieces sticking to her hand. Life had offered her nothing so enrapturing in weeks.

Then I made mistake number two: I took the envelope away, every last soggy clump of it. Again Baby A's widened, this time in horror. Was I really to be the agent who deprived her of this Nirvana? I was. Her grief passed quickly through denial and landed on anger, where it lingered for at least 20 minutes, longer than I've ever seen her in any obvious "mood."

Expressed in a series of outraged shrieks, her high dudgeon was unbudgeable. She allowed me to hold her, but when I tried to further intrude into her rage she spurned me, turning her face from my coos and kisses.

In a transference little commented on by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, her grief stages were then assumed by her father.

Bargaining had no effect. After depositing the envelope detritus in the trash, we hustled upstairs to her favorite current toy, a colored set of plastic keys: No solace there. We stepped into her favorite current device, a doorway jumper, where, lightly supervised, she often happily bounces for a quarter-hour: Not this time. The shrieks continued.

I moved into depression, and we moved over to our bed, laden with other toys: Useless. I lay on my back and swung her in the "weeza-beeza flying" game, usually sure-fire: No dice.

Not until I'd landed at acceptance ("The baby will cry continually for the next six hours, until M returns and can replace my hapless ass") did we arrive at a solution. To console myself, I turned on Springsteen's new album at a louder than wonted volume. Baby A immediately quieted, intrigued, and we danced for a while until the savage breast was soothed.

Remnants of her rage lingered. She was fussy for a few hours, and the next time we passed the table where we throw the mail, she twisted in my arms to search for the Paradise Lost of her soggy envelope. But the storm had passed.

Later in the day, in a tummy-time session lull, as a reward for some vigorous push-ups I handed her a ripped-out page from a magazine. Mistake number three. She tore into it happily enough, and I was reconciled that she would add processed paper pulp to her all-breast-milk diet.

But the inevitable point had to arrive. I thought I was prepared; when I began to extract the damp clumps from her fists, I had a fresh magazine page at the ready. But the first cut is the deepest, as Rod Stewart noted, and the second page is apparently akin to a rebound relationship -- nice in its way, but a pale echo of the lost love and no true consolation. Fortunately, this incident occurred on our tummy-time carpet, and vigorous rolling proved sufficient distraction.

The upshot: my parental lesson is learned. Perhaps this is preparation for her adolescence, when she considers attaching to other unsuitable partners. At any rate, for now I will create a barrier between her and her objects of desire, and her relationship with the nation's paper products will, for the time being, remain a long-distance one. Love the toy you're with, babe.

Pathos of the Lamb

6:04 a.m. -- 4 mos., 21 days

My father knows how to make animal noises. No "bow-wows" or "moos" or "oink-oinks" for him; his are more like barnyard impressions. As kids we thought of him as the Rich Little of animal sounds.

When he barks his signature bark -- that of a midsized pooch, starting with a hint of a growl and ending with a high-pitched plaintiveness -- neighborhood dogs have been known to turn to see the new mutt on the block. We weren't around enough cows to see if they could be fooled, but I always thought Dad's bellow particularly impressive. Cats, goats, roosters -- all sound truly animalistic. He also does a mean Woody Woodpecker.

So the bar is set high when I read Baby A's animal books, of which there seem to be quite a few in our library. This is good, since at this stage Baby A is more in love with sounds than images. The most successful of our daily reading sessions center on books with large pictures and one-word captions, with a soundtrack provided by a father desperately trying to imitate his own father.

Her current favorite is a flip-a-face book. Half its pages are set with generic cartoon eyes, nose, and mouth, while the other half feature semi-crude but recognizable cutouts of animal faces. Baby A's favorite is Cat; when I meow, she twists in my lap to gaze up at the sound. Her second favorite is Chicken, with its combination of high pitch and explosive "clucks." I've read that infants enjoy sounds at a high pitch, which is presumably why adults -- myself certainly included -- so often lapse into girly idiocy in their presence.

Continuing the face flipping, Baby A also approves of Dog (not at Dad's level, but in the ballpark), Pig (snorting is fun, with a couple of "oinks" thrown in to help her recognize the term down the road), Fox (not in Dad's repertoire, so I've improvised a "yip, yip, yip!"), Raccoon (dogged if I know, so I say "Shhhh -- raccoons are very quiet"), Panda (ditto).

Toward the end of the book are facing pages of Lion and Lamb. The first couple of times through, I tried to keep my lionine roar at a mellow level. I need not have worried. Baby A's favorite stuffed toy, along with Pat The Bunny, is Roar The Lion. Mostly she likes to suck at Roar's fuzz (which on a couple of occasions has shown up in her poop), but by now she's inured to the sound that greets her each time Roar is plopped into her lap. So even my loudest "roars" elicit, at worst, a startled widening of her eyes.

Lamb is a different story. As a class, Dad's ruminant impressions have always been among his best, with goaty little bleats or "baaas" emanating from somewhere in his sternum with particular lamb-like resonance. These sounds have long seemed to me vaguely sad, with a forlorn quality made peculiar by the animal's general cuteness and absence of expression.

But I'd never given it much thought until Baby A. Every time she hears my lamb sound -- a pale imitation of Dad's -- her face crumples, she puffs her lower lip out, and she starts to cry. To stop full-blown, tear-filled squawls, I have to hurriedly flip forward to Fox and start yipping. The first time through I thought it was a coincidence, but there's no doubting the effect -- my lame lamb impression strikes her as the most pathos-filled barbaric yawp in the history of the universe.

This new power, like many unanticipated effects of parenthood, must be handled with care. Not wanting poor Baby A to burst into tears every time she approaches a farm or petting zoo, I've been trying to get her accustomed to my bleating sound. So when we're cooking or having tummy time or when she's feeling particularly chipper, I occasionally will break into a quiet, gentle "baaaa." Outside of the reading environment -- sitting in our favorite chair, pawing at the pages, gradually building up from Pig to Panda to Chicken to Lion to Lamb -- the sound seems only to make Baby A look confused.

I count this as progress. M, for some reason, accuses me of cruelty to babies.

Travel

6:26 a.m. -- 4 mos., 15 days

Back home after a quick West Coast trip to see family. A good visit, but the travel seems to have thrown Baby A's parents off kilter, and we're both struggling with some kind of virus that has us hacking and achy but so far our infant has managed to avoid.

This was Baby A's third coast-to-coast roundtrip, and she's proven herself a good traveler. We really only have one meltdown over Kansas (on our Christmas trip) to complain about, where she was furious for no clear reason and it took all four of her parent's hands and about 20 minutes of shushing to calm her down.

This time, our West Coast leg provided us with our first real confrontation with a stranger over a parenting decision.

(I ignore the woman on the Long Island Railroad platform when Baby A was 6 days old and accompanying M and me on a business trip M was making to Washington, D.C. When she found out the child's age, and noticed that Baby A wasn't yet wearing a hat in the October chill, the woman walked away muttering to herself. All I could make out was, "It's none of your business. It's none of your business.")

Our airline of choice typically leaves its front row open to the disabled and, if no disabled folks show up, to parents with infants. Thus we can usually get aisle seats steps from the front bathroom -- ideal for quick diaper changes and providing the least discomfort to us and fellow passengers.

So we got our boarding passes switched to the front row and happily tucked into our accustomed seats. Only trouble was, the fore lavatory had a malfunctioning smoke alarm, rendering it inaccessible to anyone but the crew. Could we use it simply for diaper changes? We won't even need to flush the toilet, we pleaded. No dice, came the answer. So we faced several long trudges to the rear bathrooms.

This wasn't such a big deal. But almost as soon as we began taxiing toward takeoff, with the "fasten seat belt" lights prominently lit, Baby A either peed or decided she could no longer tolerate a previously wet diaper for another second. And, as always when she makes such a determination, she began to notify the universe of her discomfort, loudly, clearly, and continuously, demanding that remedial action be taken.

This left us with three bad options: 1). Stay seated until we hit cruising altitude and allow Baby A to cry for 20 or so minutes. 2). Stand up, ignore the seat belt light, grab the diaper bag from the overhead compartment, grab the baby, and head to the "aft lavs," as the pilot insisted on calling them in his announcements; or 3). Stand up, grab the diaper bag, and change the baby on M's lap.

Haste, safety, and the interests of our fellow passengers seemed to dictate 3). as the obvious choice. So I stood up, grabbed the changing pad out of the diaper bag, spread it on M's lap, and M plopped Baby A down, unsnapped the lower portion of her onesie, and ripped open her diaper. I stood, empty plastic bag at the ready, to take the wet (not poopy) diaper and pass a clean one.

At which point a flight attendant bustling forward stopped at our seats in horror. "You can't do that there," she snapped.

M noted that we couldn't use the front bathroom and that the fasten seat belt light was on.

"Well, you have to wait," was the peremptory response. "You can't do that in your seats. It's unsanitary." She paused, her nose crinkling with disgust. "It's gross."

I stayed standing, shocked into silence. M may have muttered something. But there was nowhere to go but onward. I put the wet diaper in the plastic bag, and we finished the change, chagrined.

As I replaced the diaper bag into the compartment, a middle-aged man in the 2nd-row aisle seat leaned forward and said, "That was out of line. Clearly, that woman has never had children."

I was about to tell him that she could take her childless ass straight to hell, but I bit my tongue. M turned. "Thank you for saying that," she said. "You're very kind."

While no passengers seemed discomfited by the incident, the flight crew was frosty to us for the whole 6 hours.

First, as had never happened on any flight, I wasn't allowed to walk Baby A in the foreward flight attendant area. And later, when the pilots opened the cabin door to use the "fore lav," and the crew had to bar the front area with a drink cart, M was standing in the aisle to calm Baby A down. The pilot commented on Baby A's cuteness.

The witchy flight attendant was having none of it. "You can't stand in the front three rows while the cockpit door is open," she told M.

"Oh, don't worry about it," the pilot said. "I'll take responsibility for this one."

"No," the attendant said. "We have to follow the rules."

M sat down, and Baby A recommenced fussing. When I returned from the aft lav and heard M's tale, I picked up the baby, walked back to the fourth row, and glared directly at the attendant barricaded behind her cart. She caught my eye briefly, then glanced away. I stared daggers until the pilots relocked the cabin door.

When we got off at the Oakland airport, we were greeted with a broken child seat. We'd checked it at the JFK gate, and one of the two crews had slung it so hard that its plastic carrying handle had snapped from its mooring anchor. It could still function as a stationary car seat, but as a portable item it was useless. If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn the flight attendant had radioed down to the ground crew to do its worst.

Fortunately, Baby A had about outgrown the seat, and we were ready to get another. We didn't tell this to the luggage supervisor, who couldn't have been more polite and gave us a $100 discount on our next flight.

I didn't ask, but he probably had a kid or two.

Tummy Time

6:23 a.m. -- 4 mos., 7 days

For 30,000 or so years, human beings allowed their infants to sleep in any position they pleased. Many of those infants slept on their stomachs. Somehow, the race survived.

For the last couple of decades, pediatricians have concluded that a few babies who sleep on their stomachs die. Much remains mysterious about the condition known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But studies indicated that the main difference between the United States, where SIDS plagued a small number of families, and the rest of the world was that U.S. babies continued to sleep on their stomachs and sides.

So for the past couple of decades, thousands of U.S. pediatricians have warned parents that, unless their infants sleep on their backs at all times, they risk the horror of a child dying for no reason beyond their own grievous inability to monitor helpless offspring.

And so for the past couple of decades, millions of U.S. parents have spent countless hours sprinting into their nurseries to ensure that their babies have not somehow maneuvered their tiny kidneys away from their tiny mattresses and rolled to a SIDSian fate.

This pediatrician propaganda works, I can attest. When Baby A was less than a month old and spending a restless night, I spent a couple of sleepless hours with her sleeping on my chest. Because she was sleeping on her stomach, for two hours I counted her breaths, certain that each could be her last.

As my mind raced, I pondered whether any SIDS deaths had taken place when infants were sleeping atop an unstoned parent. But this mattered little to my implanted paranoia, which raged until I decided she was sleeping deeply enough to be moved. Having ensured that her back was plastered against the sheets, I, like most normal human sleepers, rolled onto my stomach and soon dropped off.

Beyond raging paranoia, all this back sleeping has begot another parental bane: Tummy Time.

Now that kids are no longer spending time waking on their tummies and learning to use their arms and backs to lift their heads, pediatricians have mandated that new parents become Personal Baby Trainers. So millions of parents now spend countless hours rolling their infants onto their stomachs and encouraging them to push up, bend, lift and strengthen muscles that are atrophying in the cause of SIDS prevention.

The main thing to know about mandated Tummy Time is that, like most rational humans faced with unwanted workouts, babies hate it.

The early days were particularly unbearable. Baby A couldn't turn her neck, and her tiny face would routinely mush against the blanket, carpet, or whatever fabric that makes up the Tummy Time Toys (play mats, cloth surfboard, etcetera) we were given. Once we turned her head to the side, she'd lie there, breathing uncomfortably, while we encouraged her to lift her head. This farce usually lasted about 60 seconds before we took pity on her and rolled her back.

As Baby A's neck has strengthened and she's learned to roll, Tummy Time has become less painful. Slightly. Unless or until she's tired, Baby A can use her back muscles to lift her head and look straight ahead, left, or right. That's positive.

But her arms are a different story. If we place them, elbows bent, on either side of her face, she'll use them once or twice to push herself up. Otherwise they tend to flail or flop far in front of her, or stay pinned below her torso, rendered useless. Occasionally she pulls all four limbs up and lifts her head, leaving only her torso grounded in an airplane posture. This is cute as all get-out, but it does nothing to build arm strength.

As her primary trainer, I have spent long sessions worrying how to counteract this flabbiness in my 4-month-old's biceps and triceps. I've kneeled astride her back, calling encouragement from above her head. I've lain with my face inches from hers on our bed and on the floor, pushing up my own head and torso while she smiles at my foolishness.

One shining day last week, I thought we'd solved the problem. "Up!" I said while doing a mini-push-up, and Baby A pushed up. "Down!" I said, my face falling to the bed, and Baby A put her head down, grinning hugely. "Up!" She followed. "Down!" She followed, the smile still plastered on her face. This continued for 30 exhilerating seconds and five repetitions as I decided that a). I had the smartest 4-month-old on the planet, and b). that Tummy Time woes were solved. Then Baby A tired of the game and turned her head in search of new stimuli. Despite enormous efforts, the commands have since sparked only amused or bewildered smiles.

How does one gauge whether Tummy Time even works? Mostly our training sessions succeed in inducing her to spit up, and I spend most of them wiping vomited milk from our Tummy Time Toys. Usually, despite lots of rolling and endless, giddy encouragement, after about 4 minutes Baby A ends up whiny and frustrated, with me following about 2 minutes behind.

Our kid's plateaued, with zero apparent interest in using her arms to push her head up or roll from her stomach to her back. Her adorably doughy limbs continue to demonstrate their worrisome paucity of tone. Can we buy tiny baby weights with which she can practice curls? If these came with suckable toys, Baby A would never stop pulling them to her mouth. (Maybe there's a business idea in there somewhere.)

As it stands, Baby A has not yet started to flail or scream at the very sight of her Tummy Time surfboard. Her father, on the other hand, has come to view its pink-and-white stripes and lime green pillow only through a lens composed of anxiety, fear, and dread.