EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
First Years
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Our little guy just turned 2. Lately, when he returns from excursions with his father or grandparents, I am struck by how much he’s grown. Not since his arrival more than 25 months ago, but just since that day’s departure. Somehow, when he’s out of my sight, off on adventures with others to the supermarket or the park, the beach, the hardware store I shrink him, imagine him as he used to be, just that much smaller, just that much younger. Not much, but enough to be startled when, suddenly, a little boy walks purposefully through the door in yellow rain boots and a fleece sweatshirt. He carries library books, drags a half-filled grocery bag, starts talking about the rain, the garbage truck, how he went down the big slide at the park. He’s nearly past the calculation of his age in months, that convention of medical professionals and baby books. He’s now into years. All you have to do is ask him. He’s not the only one who has grown. His father and I have met our own milestones as parents, followed our own developmental trajectory, absent, sadly, the opportunity to compare our own progress on the kind of monthly achievement checklist the popular baby books offer for charting our child’s growth. So his birthday provides me an opportunity to offer a modest sampling from what one of these parental “What to Expect” books might look like. By the second year, parents SHOULD be able to: ** Make all animal sounds required to effectively dramatize an array of animals, wild and domestic, extinct and fantastic, found in your child’s library. The real challenge: the armadillo in “Goodnight Gorilla.” What’s he (she?) doing in that zoo anyway? ** Become a human jukebox machine, singing songs upon request (and your child will indeed make requests by the second year!). ** Leap over safety gates in a single bound. Or at least without tripping. ** Change a diaper on a car seat, floor, slide, table, office desk or on deck on the Catalina Express in, yes, a small craft warning. By the second year, parents will PROBABLY be able to: ** Translate a toddler’s vocabulary. In our home, “yo-yo” is not a toy but a food: soy yogurt. Or is it? Sometimes “yo-yo” is actually Oatios. ** Exhibit patience required to allow your child to teach himself how to put on those wildly popular, yellow rain boots or take off his socks or shirt instead of, say, speeding up the process through parental intervention. Learn when to give up and let the child sleep in his yellow rain boots. ** Laugh with your child at the sight of those yellow rain boots on his feet the next morning. By the second year, parents may POSSIBLY be able to: ** Depart from doctor visits with tears their own after waiting in a cold, white room for 40 minutes just to endure the latest inoculation regimen. ** Still respect the medical profession for its firm commitment to avoiding oral inoculation as an alternative to needles. ** Accept that peach, banana, strawberry, banana-strawberry, lemon and vanilla soy yogurts are OK, but blueberry is not. ** Accept, and understand, that the reason is because it is blue. By the second year, parents MAY EVEN be able to: ** Slow down, to a gentle cascade, the raging torrent of photographic documentation (and its companion, the video) of every stage (read hour, day, week) by doting grandparents. If the old, aboriginal fear of cameras stealing your child’s soul is even close to accurate, your adorable child is doomed. ** Sleep through the night (just kidding). ** Make up convincing stories, often involving the characters developed by professionals like Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne, and updating them with contemporary scenes. (Doubtful that Pooh Bear rode a fire truck, but it works.) ** Smell a dirty diaper from 20 yards away, on a crowded playground, correctly identifying its source as that of your progeny. ** Carefully extract your yellow-rain-boots-wearing, dirty-diapered toddler from the playground, change him on a picnic table, and return him to the sand in under (my personal best) 3 minutes. ** Recognize and appreciate the skill you’ve developed and take pride in it. Good job, higher education degree, professional awards, latest Whitney ascent? All fine enough, but pale in comparison to the frisson of pride you feel at that playground quick-change. ** Start using words like "frisson" in a sentence, now that you’re getting at least some sleep, and are, once again, generally putting words together in an order understandable by other grownups. Yes, your child can walk and talk now and well, your own parenthood is toddling along, too. Is this what you were expecting? Like your child, you sometimes wobble and fall. But my, how you are coming along. Now you are clearly a parent, someone’s mommy, someone’s papa. Or, perhaps, a mama or a dada. Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 2-year-old son, Louis. |
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