fun in threes, sometimes fours
the boy
Climbing, scooting, homework, making friends with the cat -- it's all part of the evening ritual. And with an infant, that ritual paradoxically includes the unexpected.
And a little boy who goes from silly and giggling to sick and crying in a matter of a few evening hours is one such exception, which trumps everything else -- especially a silly blog.
With K and the Boy back, things are returning to normal. Which is to say, there's more mess -- why does doubling the child count quadruple the mess? -- and more noise. The mess, well, I could live without; the noise is the best soundtrack to my life I could imagine.
When K returns from Poland, she always brings gifts from the family for us all. (It makes it sound like she's often going to Poland alone when in fact this was just the second such trip.) This year's theme for the Girl: logic games. One in particular, sort of an ever-changing maze, has captivated the Girl. She sat this morning at the refrigerator, twisting and turning the various mechanisms, making this and that pattern. The Boy, on the other hand, was thrilled with the bagel wrapper and his newly discovered skill of scooting around in a circle.
For her part, K brought back a new love of good old fashioned Polish rosol.
A whole chicken, some parsnips, carrots, and celery, and several hours of slow simmering produces the ultimate comfort food.
Comfort food now for all of us.
He sits on my lap, Friday night and he’s tired. His head resting on my chest, he slowly opens his mouth as the spoon approaches. The pureed fruit in his mouth, he mushes it against his gums, swallows, and looks up at me. His glassy eyes stare off into the distance, and a balled fist slowly comes up, rubs an eye to the accompaniment of a little fuss. I feed him the entire jar of fruit, and it’s clear that he won’t last much beyond the last bite. Within a few minutes, we’re upstairs, his head on my shoulder as I pace about the darkened room. Moments later, he’s asleep.
The great honor of being a parent is being present in those moments of ultimate trust, those moments that make us so very mortal. I am responsible for two of his most basic, mortal needs: food and a quiet, safe place to sleep. As the Girl grows more independent, these needs come less immediately from my hands: she takes food out of the refrigerator for herself; she prepares her own snacks and even helps with her own meals. It’s easy to take those basic responsibilities for granted with her. But with him, K and I are still everything — for a while.
K and the Boy have returned from two weeks in Poland. We spoke on the phone, we video chatted via Skype, but the simple fact was they were there while the Girl and I were here.
And yet we look through the pictures K took and it's just as if we went there: the familiar visits; the time spent around the kitchen table; the walks in the fields around K's folks' house; the pictures at the small chapel on the way to the river; breakfast with the sun streaming through the window; the silly play on the kitchen floor.
We weren't there, but we can see the whole story in a handful of pictures.
It's hard to get a candid shot with the Boy. He's turned into a true poser: any time he sees the camera out, the smile emerges. The hands start waving. The squealing begins.
Of late, the Girl really enjoys playing with the Boy. Not pestering him; not hanging on him; not kissing him mercilessly. Playing with him. Granted, she still does all those things: she gets a little carried away with her affection. (But then, who doesn’t?) Still, there’s been more developmental play of late, trying to get the Boy to do this or that. More gently some days than others, but still. Improvement is improvement.
"I've had him for an hour; it's your turn." K woke me with those words last night, or rather, this morning, at around three. It's not an entirely uncommon occurrence, but neither is it really all that frequent. Like most things with infants, the trouble is, you never really know when it's going to strike. A Tuesday night/Wednesday morning is a particularly bad choice, in my estimation, but there was little I or anyone else could do about it.
I took him in my arms and knew immediately it was not going to be a short exercise. The Boy's head popped right up, and he glanced around the room, taking in as much as the blue-tinted nightlight could illuminate.
"Nah nah nah!" he cooed, then patted me on the shoulder -- his way of saying, "All is well, Dad. Let's go!"
And go we did. We watched a little bit of a documentary; we played a bit; I graded some papers. (My sarcasm was unmistakable in those particular marginal notes.) At four, the fussing began, and I thought, "Not that bad. An hour? I can survive that." I walked the circuit through our kitchen and living room. The head plopped down on my shoulder. And stayed down. A few more circles, then up to bed. I lay him in his crib, took two steps away, and the howling began again.
Repeat previous paragraph.
At five, when he finally went down, I figured it made little to no sense to sleep for thirty to forty minutes, so I made the morning coffee and began wondering just what kind of a day was in store for us all.
Shortly after dinner, the inevitable.
The Boy wants to stand. Just like the Girl at this age, he pushes up into a wobbly standing position any and every time he has enough support.
We discovered tonight, though, that unlike L, the Boy loves the strange, hang-in-the-doorway bouncer that we got from who knows where or whom.
He liked the effect of jumping, bouncing here and there. He liked the effect of swinging, the gentle motion causing him to squeal his "I'm thrilled silly" squeal.
But mostly, he liked to swing his legs wildly. That boy's going to be a runner, I tell you.
“Our Father, who art in heaven,” we all intoned together during Mass this morning, and as I recited the prayer, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass separating us in the sadly named “Crying Room” from the rest of the parishioners. For a second, I stared. It’s not that I didn’t recognize myself — that would be silly. But it struck me that the reflection had aged some, that the reflection was somehow not a true image of the real me, the young me, the just getting started me, the “me” we all invest so much energy into. Then, seeing a reflection of L, standing beside me, I realized I was paying less attention to myself of late and more attention to more important things. At least that was the reflection I wanted to see. Ask others and they’re likely to say I haven’t changed that much at all. Or maybe they won’t.
The funny thing about reflections is that they often “distort” because we’ve already distorted our own self-image. Perhaps that’s why so many don’t like having their picture taken: the photo shows them an individual they hardly recognize because it is so misaligned with how they see themselves, or want to see themselves. It’s a reflection they can’t manipulate by turning their good side or altering the light. It’s time and reflection frozen, and those little slices of existence can be very unflattering when taken completely out of the contextual stream of our lives.
In some ways, then, the ultimate mirror is our children. By the time a child is L’s age, she’s reflecting much more than what we show her, and that’s always of concern. Yet children always act as a mirror for parents, and if we parents pay attention, the reflection our children provide can be a self-correction device.
It’s easy to get caught up with this reflected light, though, and think it’s the real thing. Plato and St. Paul both talk about this from different directions but with the same effect: we see ourselves reflected in the crying room glass (what a metaphor for the world — a crying room) and think that reflection is all there is to it. We forget to look through the glass to see what’s on the other side.
The same could happen with our children. When we live too vicariously through our children, when we try to force them to reflect the light we want in all situations, we’re doing the same thing. We’re not looking through the pane of our children’s achievements but merely at our reflection within it.
Looking at my reflection this morning, I thought back to an earlier point in the Mass when the Fr. Joe was swinging the thurible over the altar, with great wafts of smoke rising and curling, slowly creating a haze around the altar that we could have not only seen but smelled had our family not been in self-exile in the crying room. Fr. Joe’s words, too, were altered, coming through speakers that made him sound remote and artificial.
That somehow seems to be a metaphor for all the things we miss out on when we get too caught up in all those reflections. And one of the dangers of always carrying around a camera is the tendency to increase that separation, to view what’s going on around as cliche director in one of those films about films, always going around with his thumbs and forefingers making a rough frame for imagining life to be a film, a two-dimensional projection of one’s own overly-hyped interpretations.
At the very least, we can wait to impose a storyline on life until we are home, the kids are in bed, and we’re sitting a keyboard.
When the Girl was much younger, much smaller, and much lighter, we spent a lot of time down at the swing. L could pass whole afternoons in the swing if she would have had someone there patient enough to push her that long. If took the time, I could find pictures of me pushing her, Papa pushing her, Dziadek pushing her, friends pushing her -- anyone who came for a visit, down there by the small creek that forms the boundary between our property and the neighbor's, pushing, pushing, pushing. Higher, higher, higher. That was the formula.
Today, we took the Boy down for the first time.
It must be genetic -- his love and fascination were instantaneous.