March 8, 2008: Seventeen Months Old

I’m trying to decide which new discovery you are more obsessed with this month: sticks, puddles, or Where the Wild Things Are. Your recently acquired sturdiness on your feet has led you to the most delighted awareness of the melting snow surrounding us for miles in every direction, and the vast world of dangerous and messy things waiting beneath. Saying the word “outside” is a certain way to shift your attention from holding the cat in the air by the tail or scaling the bookshelves. You sign for your shoes and you sign for your coat and you sign for your fiddlers three. Out and into the glaring sun and dripping slush, you take off in whichever direction your whim directs. Down the icy, north-facing hillside or into ankle-deep puddles of half-frozen mud, you are in toddler heaven.

No matter where you go, you have to have a stick in hand. Preferably one in each. A recent wind-stormed downed a dead pine down near the mailbox, and the behemoth shuddered off all its twigs and limbs on the descent. They lay scattered around the road and down the hill. Hundreds of sticks. Thousands. Between you and Fenway, every one of them has been touched, gnawed, dragged through the mud, and relocated somewhere else in camp.

Fortunately and unfortunately, your unwillingness to keep mittens on has forced you to make some adjustments to your headlong charge into the wilderness. Whenever you hit ruts and become unsteady, you stop and back up (or screech for me) instead of toppling and plopping bare-handed into the wet snow. But like the primate you are, you have figured out how to use sticks as tools. You are not yet extracting bugs from holes, but you are dipping your lick-em-stick in the snow and enjoying mouthfuls of the stuff without freezing your fingers. Ingenious.

Even inside, sticks are a fascination. The box holding kindling firewood is your favorite toy. You empty it of sticks, toss any offending books off the lower portions of the bookcases, and fill the shelves with firewood. We find kindling squirreled away in every corner of the house. In the bathroom sink, behind our mixing bowls, inside your diaper drawer, under our bed covers.

But this re-arranging of sticks may have less to do with what they are and more to do with their portability. Lately, re-furnishing the house has been your determined task. I find your clothes dragged out of drawers and re-stuffed into couch crevices or crib rails. Tupperware finds its way under the coffee table or into the bathtub. Books move from room to room inside laundry baskets or plastic juice pitchers. If I want to whip up a certain recipe for dinner, I have to start the search for the cookbook sometime the night before. When I catch you in the act of jamming duplo blocks under the baby gate, you just grin with gleeful pride. Yet another task completed, another skill mastered.

Sometimes in the midst of reorienting our living space, you will wander over with the desire to actually read one of these books. More often than not, the book that has captured your interest is Maurice Sendack’s classic story about the land of the wild things. You hold up the floppy book – for this is one of your first real paper-paged stories, no doubt a large fraction of your fascination – and say “buh, buh,” trying to do the sign for book with one hand clasping the spine. You take my hand and drag me over to our space on the floor, open my hand and jam the book into it. Then you turn around and position yourself about a foot in front of me. Backing up slowly without looking, you plop, bottom-first, into my waiting lap, and start turning the pages.

You are not so taken by the story. You turn the pages before I reach the end of a sentence. And the wild things swinging from the trees are only of mild interest. You like to see Max in his room, the trees and vines growing. You like to mimic him telling the beasts, “no!” And you really like the moon in the window above the table holding cake, soup, and a drink. And you never let me miss the very last page, in which Max’s supper is still “hah.” When I try to put this book down and reach for another, you are not having it. You slap away any of the board books I dangle in front of you. You reach, again and again, for Where the Wild Things Are. Five times, a dozen. You want to flip through those pages and look at Max chasing the dog with the fork or demanding the beasts “be still!”

I believe you understand much more than you let on. What a thrill it must be to imagine taming the giants who rule your world, to tell them “no!” To have us cower before you. How huge you must feel when you put yourself inside that world. So when we don our boots and sun-hat again and head out into the endless landscape of stones and mud, I see you inhabiting that hugeness. With your sticks digging trenches deep into the snow, with your mighty stomps sending slush and ice flying, you are the king off all you see. The most wild thing of all.

March 2, 2008: All Through the Night

It's never easy to admit when something I have committed to is no longer working. How do I get back all the hours and energy I have paid out in attempting, justifying, determining to make it work? How does a person just let it go and move on to try something different?

Everything about attachment parenting makes sense to me. Staying close to my son by bringing him with us on the various meanderings of our lives is an intuitive fit.  I respond when he cries or fusses. He is always in my awareness and usually within arm's reach. Day. And night. All night. Every night since the very first night he arrived, fussing and squalling when the nurses put him in that plastic bassinet, and I had to bring him into my hospital bed in order for us both to feel secure and relaxed enough to rest.

Eliot is almost a year and a half old, and he has never spent a night outside the embrace of someone who loves him. And for the first year or so, this mostly worked for us. All of us, in our big king-sized bed, could rest easy in each other's sleepy company. Occasionally, Eliot would sleep four or five hours at a stretch, both of us waking just enough to nurse and drift off again into oblivion. It has been wonderful to wake up with my sweet boy looking up at me, knowing he is confident in his belonging to us, in our safe and loving family.

But that first year ended five months ago. And for almost the entire stretch since Eliot crossed over into toddler-hood, all those sweet and delicious feelings about sleep have festered into vinegar and ammonia. Eliot does not stay curled in the little nest we made him next to our bed, surrounded by his menagerie of stuffed animals, for longer than an hour a night. He crawls into our bed, nurses every hour or two, wiggles, punches, arches, kicks, demands attention. Up until almost midnight on more nights than I care to admit, he bounces around the room like a jumping bean, climbing up and sliding down furniture, yanking our hair and noses and patience. Toby and I, puffy-eyed and miserable, glare with simmering rage at each other as if one of us were to blame for this state of affairs. And after each of these wretched nights spent turbo-attachment-parenting, Eliot is up bright and early, scaling our bodies as if we were playground equipment, revved and ready for his day.

I guess I have known for a while I was racing towards the brick wall. Dreading evening, despising morning, dragging through my afternoons, hollering at Eliot, staring in the mirror and admonishing myself to cling to the last shreds of temper I had remaining while attempting to scrub some vigor back into my pale, wan face. . . all pretty clear signs of imminent collapse. "But we are co-sleepers," I pronounced inwardly and to anyone who would listen. "I believe in the family bed! I love sleeping with my son!" (Except that I hate it and I am starting to hate him and myself and my husband and God and that stupid baby doll Eliot must dress and undress and kiss good-night six-hundred and thirty times before settling down to sleep). I figured I was inches away from impact when I found myself buried under the covers at 11pm after a week without sleep, Eliot giggling as he hurled himself into my back, me screeching at Toby to just "get him AWAY from me!"

So. Toby pulled the crib from the garage, re-assembled it in Eliot's room. By 7pm on Friday night, Eliot was fed, scrubbed, pajama-ed, and plopped into his very own bed with his purple monkey, his baby, and a shirt of mine for olfactory comfort. Toby and I hunkered down for the inevitable long night of misery all the books told us we were in for. Eliot howled for fifteen excruciating minutes. Then, silence. He woke only twice in the night, cried for about a minute each, then settled himself back down. All night, I waited for him to start up again. I prayed for his protection and comfort, wrote in my journal, read a good novel, puttered around the kitchen, obsesses about Eliot dying in his crib with me in the other room, and found a variety of new ways to keep myself from getting any rest. Eliot, for his part, slept until almost 8am and woke up happy as a clam.

The second night is the hardest, though, according to the anecdotes. So, last night, I had him scrubbed and nursed and in the crib by 6:45. I left him howling, ready to hunker down for a long night of misery. By 6:45 and 30 seconds, he was sound asleep. And he slept until 7:00 this morning. And me? I had no problem giving over, finally, to deep, restful, decadent, heavenly rest.

Could Eliot have been as sleep deprived as I was? Twelve hours a night? This is what my friends tell me their toddlers need, and I just assumed their little ones were stuck in baby-jail all night, awake and unable to rouse their snoring parents. Could it be that they all actually need that long stretch of slumber? Could it be more restful than crammed into a bed with a couple of restless adults?

Was co-sleeping really not working for us for FIVE MONTHS? Did I really put up with this misery for so long? Did I really believe it was right for my son's mother to be a walking (barely) heap of resentment and exhaustion? I wandered so long in the chilly shadow cast by that giant boulder of sleep deprivation, I almost forgot the light. Not until I heard its creak and groan, the menace of its imminent fall, that I scurried out of the way. And found all these treasures hidden in plain view. Rest. Hope. Joy in my child. My husband. Myself.

We moms enjoy venting our frustrations about caring for our children and families to one another. Without being aware of the shape my complaints were taking, I had sketched out a perception that motherhood is struggle. The joy is in snatches of the divine I witness through my son's journey, but pleasure is not only non-existent, it is irrelevant. I had come to believe my own body, my spirit, and my emotional energy only exist in the service of my child and my family. But with these hours of sleep, Eliot gives himself the gift of rest and rejuvenation, and I am free to roam my own desires, my own heart. I pray. I write in my journal. I sink into the delicious pages of a novel, and maybe even get to enjoy a game of scrabble or a glass of wine with my husband. Maybe caring for a family contains secret pleasures we moms rarely admit, even to each other.

February 3, 2008: Sixteen Months Old (almost)

A few nights ago, we had a 50’s dance party in the living room with your daddy and your Gramma Lolly. We were all bopping to “Purple People Eater” and “Charlie Brown,” and you boogying to your own kind of twist.

Watching us jump and shimmy, you tried it all. Balancing on a one-legged squat, you stomped the other foot up and down like you were keeping time to a jug band. You clapped, squealed, bounced, and, arched back with toothy grins. Leading with one arm stretched across your chest to the opposite shoulder, you turned yourself in dizzy circles as if someone was tugging your reigns. Wobbling around the house, you sidled into the fridge and the baby gate as you attempted to regain your balance. Your face was pink, you were out of breath, and you joyfully danced your way through the entire CD.

You are forever testing your physical limits as well as the limits we set for you. It seems like you have just discovered the whole height and breadth of the skin you inhabit. You climb up and down off the bed at night, launching yourself head-first over the edge, screeching as you slide down the sheets and onto the floor. You stand up on every surface, regardless of how squishy or uneven. As you wobble your way upright on the sofa or coffee table and reach your hands up over your head, I can almost see your pelvis swaying and sending subtle signals to your knees and feet to maintain that delicate balance. Up and down the stairs, you hold onto a proffered hand, but reach and bend with your entire body as you seek purchase on the next step.

Our walks in the snow have become exercises in negotiating boundaries. You want to walk on the ice, of course – another fascinating surface to tumble over. You want to climb the steep, snow-covered hill behind the house. And, without fail, you want to scale the boulders lining the drop-off to the creek.

Oh, that creek. That snake of eddies and miniature waterfalls burbles temptingly in front of the house, along the road, and all the way through camp. You see a whirling spectacle of sparkling bubbles; I see a roiling pit of iced danger. You yank and pull, attempting to escape my iron grip as you wobble your way through the face-high winter weeds and boulder your way up the rocks. I hold on and tell you no. Looking over the edge, we both peer down into the swirling water. I can imagine every possible, terrible scenario, walking myself through each step of infant CPR. Your mouth waters.

To preserve the goodwill in our family, we spend more time indoors than out at this stage. Fortunately, your ever-expanding repertoire of skills and insights makes inside just as much fun as out. Any person seated on the floor is a jungle gym. Every object is a footstool. Every countertop, glimmering with blades and glass and powders and elixirs, awaits your eventual summit.

You delight in every new accomplishment, whether it is stacking three blocks, unscrewing the lid from a plastic bottle, or manifesting a string of bubbles from the wand as you shout, “bub-buh!” You drop everything when the downstairs door opens. Running towards the stairs, signing “mommy” or “daddy” or “doggy,” you stand with your forehead pressed to the gate, waiting to wrap your arms tight around the neck of whichever member of your tribe has come back to you.  

Your awareness of the people around you is beginning to blossom in full. Sometimes when you are trying to get to sleep, you stop nursing, look up at me, and say, “woof,” then sign for doggy. I tell you Fenway is out in the living room, asleep and watching over the house. Satisfied, you start nursing again. A few moments later, you stop, look up at me, and sign, “daddy.” I tell you daddy is asleep in the bed, and we look together up at Toby sleeping, signing for sleep and bed and daddy. We go through gramma, the kitty, the doggy again, sometimes even your baby doll, whom we have to put to sleep through an elaborate ritual of kisses and rocking and patting and not-so-gentle squeezes. Then you say night-night to everyone, blowing kisses with fervor all around the house.

January 5, 2008: Fifteen Months Old

Yesterday at the mall, you noticed three giant paper daisies in bright blue standing in a display window. You wobbled towards the glass, pointing, signing, “flower, flower.” I did not show them to you. Instead, you discovered them entirely on your own, making sense of their shape and somehow connecting them to the other images of flowers you have seen. Pictures from the pages of books have started to leap out around you into the real world, and you are making the symbolic jump along with them. You recognize and sort the objects you come across, naming them, asking for clarification and recognition with your signs and sounds.

Another display window exhibited a miniature winter fantasy-land, with ski slopes, ice-skating penguins, a train circling a Christmas-lit track. You watched in fascination until you spotted one item you recognized: a little figurine of a red dog. You zeroed in on that pooch and signed “doggy” repeatedly. “Yes, yes, it’s a dog,” I said again and again. “But look at the train, Eliot, the water wheel on the mill, the skiing people.” You were not interested. We have not taught you these words or ideas yet. Ice-skaters have not made an appearance in any of your board books, and we have not shown you the sign for train. So that red doggy was the one thing you returned to, one thing you were confident in knowing.

The responsibility to introduce you to an ever-expanding array of things and ideas weighs heavily. Someday, you will pick up all kinds of new information – welcome and unwanted – from classmates, coaches, camp buddies. At this age, though, if we don’t teach it, you won’t learn it.

Our world is bounded. We have deer, a climbing wall, snowy hillsides and an icy creek, but we do not have airplanes, tennis courts, fire engines, or crosswalks. Because of this, I am grateful for the litter of books around our house. You plow through each room at some point every day, pulling volumes off shelves and sifting through them at will. Sometimes we read together. Sometimes you leaf through them alone.

Two nights ago, when we sat on your bed to read Goodnight Moon, I noticed you recognized images on every single page. With a combination of signs and sounds, you pointed out the balloon, the light, the clocks, the moon, the cow, the bears, the brush, the mouse and kittens and socks and stars and even the bunny getting into bed – signing both “rabbit” and “bed” even though those words are not even in the storyline.

It was not an astounding accomplishment in the moment. You have learned a new sign or sound every day, each word a small cognitive leap. What delights us is your ability now to put these symbols together into a narrative, beginning to paint a picture of what you understand. You are not just using your signs to ask to nurse or for a cookie. You are beginning to tell us what is happening and what you see. When I turn on the bath water, you sign “bath.” When you hear the front door open, your face lights up and you sign “daddy!”

Along with these new conceptual skills comes frustration with what you cannot say or accomplish. Just as you found your feet and the world grew so much bigger, so did your desire to know it and master all you encounter. But the horizon of possibility has sped off beyond your immediate grasp. I can feel you reaching, wanting, grabbing for what is just beyond your fingertips. Sometimes you will stand staring at me with complete, undisguised intensity, making uh-uh-uh noises, as if willing me to know what you require. As I search for what you may want, you will sign your requests – please, help, please, help – over and over, until you resort to smacking yourself on the thighs and melting onto the floor in a fit of tears.

Your ability to sign diaper, food, drink, nurse, book, outside, and cracker doesn’t do us much good if you need to tell me your feet are sweaty, you want to play on the stairs, or you are missing your daddy. And when you can see how the barrels nest together, each one fitting together inside the next, but you cannot quite make your hands push the pieces together, it is no wonder you toss them across the room in exasperation. It is also no wonder you are back at them again moments later. Your desire to master the skill far outpaces any of the paralyzing frustration that may be chasing it down. With all you have absorbed along your journey so far, you have not yet learned the concept of giving up. And I have no intention of teaching you the sign for that.

December 31, 2007: Happy New Year!

With 2008 just hours away, we are getting excited about the promise of a new year, the presidential election, and Eliot's busy toddler-hood. Snow blankets the ground, a fire crackles in the fireplace, and our little family is feeling pretty darned lucky in our corner of the world. We hope you are enjoying a similar sense of contentment wherever you are.

We took part in the great Colorado tradition of hoofing it deep into the National Forest to slaughter a tree for the holidays (permit pre-purchased, of course).

You may assume it looks pretty scrawny here, and you would be right. This mini-tree is just the right size for our mini-living room, crammed into its corner beside the couch and behind the coffee table. Eliot had to scale multiple pieces of furniture to get to it. He managed to pull it over on himself once before Christmas was through.

That's my man!

Much to mama's chagrin, Eliot loves the downhill slalom as much as his daddy. We quickly discovered that plastic Wal-Mart sleds just aren't versatile enough for the vast expanse of contour lines surrounding us. . .

. . . so Gramma Genie purchased a fancy bent-wood L.L.Bean sled for the bug. On Christmas Eve, the boys -- including our new Facilities Director and neighbor, Dave -- put the fancy chariot together. Eliot was a big help, and Mozart provided much needed oversight.

Mush, Gramma! (Meanwhile, Fenway engages in her curious annual snow worship ritual)

One of Eliot's most engaging gifts is a hand-made game of family "memory." He repeatedly sifted through the photos to find the ones of his mom and dad, then proceeded to carry them around like lucky pennies in his sweaty little fists for the next three days until the lamination wore off.

FFA-wannabe Eliot Hettler practices loading livestock into his new tractor.

From our home to yours -- Happy 2008!