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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
First Years (0-2)
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Bi-pedalism arrived at our house fairly inauspiciously. You really had to have been there. We were of course, waiting for it for weeks. Exactly seven days before his first birthday, in case you wondered. Weirdly, everybody does. “When did he walk?” they ask. It is, apparently, one of those big developmental calendar days. A start and a finish, in one. Except this one is like both beginning a marathon and ending it. And we stood there, at the finish line, marked “Infant,” and the start line, “Toddler,” proud parents waving and smiling and clapping. For months, we had watched our little guy while he watched us. His eyes tracked us across the room. His head lifted, turned. He rolled over. He sat. He crawled. He climbed. He stood. He cruised. We watched as he put it all together. Like the song: Foot bone connected to the leg bone, connected to the hip bone, connected to the back bone. Everything was, of course, connected to that big head bone on top of his shoulder bone. We could almost hear the gears of his brain moving. He was, of course, learning, if that isn’t too easy a word for it. Then, one day, he stood up and walked across the living room carpet and, just like that, sat down again. Neil Armstrong it wasn’t, not quite, except that it was one small step for our little man and a giant leap for his parents. Happy fools, we could now brag about our locomoting super-child, his speed and agility and precariousness and his tendency to only occasionally bump or fall or bounce. What would he do next, we wondered? Fly, become invisible, leap tall buildings in a single toddle? His first steps transformed our familiar old world into his new world. We watched as he first mapped and then conquered unknown territory with a kind of dogged waddling stubbornness and intrepid bravery that rivaled Lewis and Clark. The fenced perimeters of the back deck. The pillowy heights of Mama and Daddy’s bed. The scruffy carpet in the home office. The natural boundaries of our neighborhood: road, beach, creek, hill, canyon. This new world promises others to come. In our upright toddler, we see more clearly the child, the adolescent and even the adult. In that face now settling in a whole new way, in the funny adjustments to upright posture, in the shake of his head, we glimpse a future. In his surprisingly stern brow as he trundles down the hall on a mission to locate the bulldozer he abandoned earlier. In that lower lip that pushes out as he observes that same bulldozer as he guides it along with its unlikely cargo of cheerful zoo animals. In the solid little boy who lopes about the house like a miniature Groucho Marx, we see his sense of humor and, when he turns around for acknowledgment, we see that he knows it. We’re not sure why he walks like Groucho, though the baggy outfits we favor for him certainly encourage this impersonation. Do all toddlers bend their knees and bounce like that? Lean forward on one leg and cautiously peer around corners as if they were outlaws on the lam? For a few days, or weeks or months, our kid has become a comic actor. We certainly hope he doesn’t outgrow that completely and that in years to come we can still find the vestiges of his Groucho period. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Laguna Beach with her husband and 1-year-old son, Louis. She is a regular contributor to this column. For comment in our Letters department: OCFmag@aol.com or ocfamily.com. |
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