Flower Child

Well, baby Zane, your Mom and Dad got married seventeen years ago today. Obviously they hail from the school of “wait and see” when it comes to having babies, but it seems to have paid off handsomely.

p.s. Nice hair!

Yesterday was Faith’s day off. As she enjoyed a mostly baby free day Zane and I picked up some lumber, a load of bark mulch, bought groceries, ate a few meals (french toast for baby breakfast!), and cruised and cruised and cruised. While I cooked and did dishes, Zane worked on his Rube Goldberg transportation setup. I’d put him down, standing, next to a kitchen chair. He’d cruise to the other side of the table and then use a standing toy as a walker to get to the other side of the living room, from there he could cruise along the walls and down the hall to peek in on his mom. I’d bring him back, put everything back in place and he’d do it again…only faster.

He’s starting to really focus on how things work. There’s a standing toy where balls are put in the top to roll down a corkscrew ramp. He’s chewed on the balls and poked at the colored shapes in the past. Yesterday after I cycled a couple balls through it he “figured it out” and spent the next fifteen minutes bending over to pick up a ball and then standing to put it back in the top.

He’s also dead set on figuring out how to go UP the slide.

Using the less than accurate (or repeatable) bathroom scale he seems to be hanging out at nineteen pounds, although he feels about ten pounds heavier. The top tooth is coming in pretty quick with no sign of its counterpart yet. Dadda is his primary word but we are starting to hear others. I swear he said CAT yesterday. I looked at him in wonder and asked, “did you say CAT??” He gave me a quizzical look, as if questioning my sanity, and then waited until I wasn’t looking and said it again.

And then there’s the squeal. It’s a paint-peeling, rust-removing high pitched squeal that you’d rather never, ever hear. To Zane’s credit he seems to think of it as a test of his upper register: sitting perfectly upright, straightening the neck, and belting out in true operatic fashion. You can tell that he’d like to be congratulated.

Zane and I were sitting on a bench at a store waiting for his Mom to come back when we heard a high pitch squeal from a nearby aisle. “Hey, that’s your frequency,” I told Zane. He perked up, cocking his head, and responded with a short subdued squeal (don’t want to play your best hand right away). A few seconds later came the reply. Zane answered, a bit louder and longer. A dad with one son closing in on ten the other within a half year of Zane came into view. The dad was smiling and laughing to himself but he also didn’t stop to chat. I suspect he has experienced full bore squealathons and had no desire to encourage another one. As they faded from view the two boys exchanged a few more squeals and Zane went back to studying the patterns of the metal bench.

My grand master plan to have Zane pick all of the dandelions never panned out. He’ll pick a few, maybe eat one, and then quickly grows bored and looks for something more shocking to eat. Faith looked it up and found that, all things considered, eating dandelion flowers isn’t too bad (most of the plant is edible). Now that we aren’t trying to stop him from eating dandelions he has completely lost interest.

Now rocks, those are great parent triggers! What is the deal with that? How can a kid that’s barely a year old develop a sense of what his parents don’t want him to do and then try and try and try to do it?