To the Tooth of the Matter

There are few absolute truths that apply to everyone in this world, few items that I can point to any given person in any given place and say the exact same thing about every one of them and be utterly and unerringly correct.  We are all different, monumentally different in our life experiences,  relationships, beliefs, and whether we call it “soda” or “pop.”  For example, I don’t know you, dear reader, from any other of the millions of potential IP addresses that may visit this blog whether purposefully or in search of information about “cat poop diseases.” But I can say unequivocally and supreme confidence that:  “You don’t remember what it was like when you’re first tooth came in.”

Admit it, I am, of course, correct.  How could you remember?  Based on my admittedly scant research it appears a human being doesn’t even have a proper brain until the age of 3 – everything before that is done using a temporary, memoryless brain that grows in your abdomen and eventually morphs into your appendix.  So not remembering when that first little white sliver of a chomper burrowed its way out of your adorable gums to someday rend regular people food into digestible chunks is understandable.

Naturally though, it would help immensely to have some memory of the milestone, if for no other reason than when decades later, your own offspring suddenly begins having wild moodswings, waking in the night to scream in pain, and drooling like a Saint Bernard on a hot day, you have some notion of what she’s going through. I’m told that being able to relate at an emotional level to the experiences of your children will lead you both to bond to one another, offering meaning in life to the parent and at least partial payment of college for the child.  Thus my inability to relate to Justine’s suffering may indirectly force her into attending DeVry rather than the more formidable University of Phoenix Online.

Clearly teething is what we are suffering through at the moment.  Justine already has developed her two bottom teeth – they came in about a month ago, and have served to mar her adorable little baby smile and infect it with an (admittedly) equally adorable “old prospector ‘I’ve struck it rich, daggumit!’” grin.  Those two teeth led to some sleepless nights, but for the most part she seemed to weather the “punch through” reasonably well.

Not so with these top two teeth, which, despite the relentless pull of gravity (and the needle nose pliers I pull them with while she sleeps) have stubbornly taken their sweet time in descending. At this point the right chomper has made an appearance, although at this point it looks more like an errant grain of rice she has stuck on her gums than the formidable breast-feeding hazard it is destined to become.  It’s companion on the other side still lurks beneath the surface, an ugly and probably painful bulge still trying to make it’s way to the surface and causing all of us considerable consternation.

Worst of all I can’t relate to the situation – for all my mind tells me, my teeth emerged painlessly or perhaps I was born with the full set I have now.  I have no recollection of getting my original teeth, only losing them, and the painful discovery that the tooth fairy was in cahoots with my mother, reselling my precious cast offs to her so she could keep them in a drawer in her dresser.  Which, also in retrospect, is rather creepy on my mother’s part.  Perhaps she hoped to one day clone me using the DNA trapped inside, which although appealing to me in reducing my workload, would probably horrify my wife.  But I digress.

So time will march on, Justine will let out her piercing cries in the night, I will remain  oblivious to the pain she’s going through (and the cries too – thanks, earplugs) and someday, hopefully soon, those teeth will lock into place and we can all start sleeping again.  Until that other brain kicks in at least.

Bustin’ a Move

One of the few conveniences of children “fresh from the oven” so to speak is that they are, for the most part, immobile lumps of screaming humanity.  So while yes they may cry uncontrollably, sleep erratically, and have sticky tar-like explosions, you can pretty much leave them wherever you would like and when you come back moments (or days) later, they will be where you left them.  This is perfect for those moments when you want to steal away to the bathroom, or pop in the kitchen for a snack, or jet to the aquarium store to pick up yet another goldfish to replace the one your cat inexplicably fished out and ate.

Things become mildly more complicated when your little one figures out how to roll over.  This precludes several normal infant resting spots, including atop the refrigerator and on the window sill next to the pie that you baked.  But again, for the most part, and with proper use of chocks and wedges, it is possible to get away for a few moments to shoo away the Mormons or place bets with your bookie.

But at some point, despite all of your attempts to dissuade the practice, the proverbial lightbulb will click in your child’s head, and things will suddenly, and irreversibly, change forever.

Yes friends, our little Justine has learned to crawl.

It was a slow but sure process with her, taking several weeks for her to put all the pieces together.  In what anthropologists have informed us is a fairly radical evolutionary mutation, she actually learned to pull herself into a sitting position before she learned to crawl.  That happened very suddenly, and we were both shocked to watch her do it.  From there we assumed crawling would be a snap.

Instead she laboriously practiced each individual component of the crawl, figuring out optimal launch angles, head position, and thigh-leg force quotients.  She started by assuming the “position,” the classic “all fours.”  It took her awhile to get her legs untangled – for about a week she was doing a patented “all three and a half.”  After she mastered that she’d go up into the launch, and then rock forward, and then back into a sitting position.  She would do this over and over again, and Kim and I would both sit forward, anticipating that “this was it.”  Eventually we stopped paying attention, me going back to my organizing my lint collection by color and material and Kim practicing her squirrel calls.

Finally, one day she lunged forward and made a few tentative crawls before the expected Maggie Simpson landed her face-first in the carpet.  Unfazed, she’d continue this learning process until she finally figured it out.  We helped her along by enticing her to crawl in different directions, whether it be by waving an iPhone, dropping a ball, or tethering one of the cats to her.  Now, she’s a crawling master, undeterred from undertaking epic quests and crossing entire rooms to bag whatever quarry she may be after.  You know what this means.

Time to lock up the liquor cabinet.  And EVERYTHING else.

A Tearful Goodbye

It’s cliche, to be sure, but when my sister’s picture popped up on my phone at work, I knew something was wrong.  And in an instant, a key figure in my life and the lives of the people I know and love suddenly was gone – my Grandpop had passed away.  It was and is devastating to me, as losing a grandparent is to anyone. It weighs on me, and I find myself at those odd times of reverie conjuring up random bits of memories about him, then feverishly trying to hold onto those memories, desperate not to lose them to the haziness of time.  It’s a losing battle, and it’s heartbreaking.  But while I still have the clarity, I can share some of those memories with you.

My grandfather was a fascinating man.

When I was a kid my parents would take us over to their house for holidays, or just to visit.  I remember one of the first things we used to do was head down into the basement to see what Grandpop was up to.  He was astoundingly good with his hands – he designed and built from scratch the house that they lived in – and the basement was his sanctuary.  He was always working on something, whether it be additions to the workbench he built, re-wiring the electricity in the house, or just crafting unique objects because they interested him at the time – he spent months just experimenting with different kinds of wood joints, and months more crafting different varieties of crosses.

He spent the war years in the Navy, and came out of it with a taste for the strongest coffee I’ve ever known.  He’d always take the empty cans and re-use them in his workshop to hold nails and screws.   He loved math – we’d always get him books on various aspects of it, and he’d invariably show up at holiday dinners with equations for us to solve.  He was also fond of the German language, and my birthday cards from him were always in his distinctive script, and littered with German words and phrases.  I still have a few of them somewhere.

I think he just loved to learn, a trait that my father certainly inherited and has taken up in his own retirement.  Grandpop always came to family gatherings armed with interesting items he had read (often with the Wall Street Journal article in hand), or the latest diagrams he had been tinkering with.  I remember recently I gave my father an old telegraph tapper for Christmas – I thought it was neat and thought he’d get a kick out of it.  He lent it to my grandfather and the next time I was home, I was treated to an extensive diagram of how the thing worked.  He and his friend had hooked it up and made this 60 year old tapper work again, just to figure it out.

One of my favorite stories about him is with his cars.  When I was growing up he tooled around town in an powder blue Oldsmobile.  After my grandmother died, he continued driving, despite having a newer model (probably late 80s) parked in the garage.  Eventually the area around the wheel wells started to corrode.  Ditch the car for the new one, right?  Instead he covered the rusted parts with more than several layers of duct tape, adding a silver sheen to rear quarters of his car.  We dubbed it the “Duct Tape Mobile.” He drove that car for years until it finally gave up the ghost.  The other car?  It was parked in the driveway the day he passed away.

He loved going to the Phillies games – for years my father would pick him up on Sundays with one or two of us kids in tow and travel downtown via the subway to watch the team.  We’d always pack a lunch in the cooler, but he always had a paper or plastic bag with him.  My father finally broke down and bought him a Phillies lunch bag – I don’t know for sure if he ever used it though.  I remember sitting in the back of the car heading to many a game while my father and Grandpop would chat away, Grandpop steering the conversation from one tangent to the next, trying to cover all the interesting things he had in his head.

The last time I was at his house was to introduce him to Justine.  Deep into retirement and my grandmother having been gone for so many years, it was a vast array of newspapers, books, the aforementioned crosses, and thousands of other trinkets and ephemera that he had collected over the years.  My wife had never really talked with him one on one before, and he regaled us with tales of his youth, and about building the house.  He gave us a tour, showing her the aforementioned basement, and the curious design decision of putting the washer and dryer in the kitchen.  Then we took a picture with him, his grandson, and great grand daughter.  It is one of the fondest memories I have of him, and we are so grateful that Justine got to, however briefly, sit in his arms.

I guess the hardest thing for me to accept is that Justine will never get to know her great grandfather in the ways that I did – to her he may end up being just another face in a large collection of photos from the first months of her life, another “who’s that, Daddy?” as we someday look through those memories together.  I know how she feels – my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away when I was two years old, and to this day I know very little about her, her life, and what impact she had on everyone she knew.  I don’t want my daughter to miss out on the amazing man that her great-grandfather was.

So I will tell her.  I will tell her as many of the stories that I can remember, show her the trinkets he created out of wood, the birthday cards, and drive by the house he built.  And I will prod my parents, and my family to tell her their tales of him, who he was, and what he meant to them.  I want to help her fill the gap, to connect her to this man that meant so much to us, so that she too can, in some way, know him as we did.

Rest in peace, Grandpop.  We’ll miss you.

A Ride on the Comet

It was another fairly normal evening.  I arrived home from work to hear the impatient whines of my daughter pleading with her mother to please, FEED FASTER.  Green beans were on the menu, a favorite fare for Justine, and she was happily lapping up large spoonfuls of the green goo.  Soon she was finished, just in time for a fabulous dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes that my wife slaved over, and I hungrily devoured, pausing between face-stuffings to make funny faces at Justine who stared blankly back.  Tough crowd, I guess.

Our nightly victuals consumed, we adjourned to the living room for an hour of Daddy-Daughter time, where I atoned for being gone all day by succumbing to the wishes of my little girl and sat and watched as she picked things up, dropped them, and then picked them up again. Fascinating.  After a while of that she moved on to her new favorite activity – unfolding clean laundry from the laundry basket.  First grabbing the edge, she pulls it down to her mouth for a lick, and then pulls it all the way to floor and proceeds to pull out each item of clothing, taste it, and throw it behind her.  My mind drifted as I pondered teaching her to sort socks – now THAT would be something.

I was jolted from my reverie as she toppled to one side, bonking her head on the floor and letting out a scream.  My fatherly instinct kicked in and grabbed the iPhone, waving it at her.  Steve Jobs knows how to captivate – she was transfixed.  Thus began a lengthy bout of crawling practice – over to one side to get the iPhone, back over to get a regular phone.  The juxtaposition of old technology to new was quite striking – although I’m not sure she picked up on it – she seemed more concerned tasting the phones rather than pondering their cultural significance.

She tired of the game, and that’s when the trouble began.   I picked her up and held her in the air.  She giggled.  I flipped her on her belly than back into a sitting position.  She squealed.  I lay down on my back and put her on my stomach.  Then I started doing sit-ups, rolling her back and forth with me.  She laughed.  Encouraged, I did it again.  More laughter.  One more time!

That’s when she vomited on my face.

Night Terrors

Regular readers of the blog may recall early on a discussion about how Justine was decidedly different from other newborns.  Yes I recounted, with perhaps a shade of naivete, the glorious ‘through the night and then some’ sleeping habits of our beautiful daughter.  I’m sure many of you that have already traversed the early years of parenting read this with a knowing smile, confident in the fact that at some point, either in the near or distant future, that situation would invariably change.  Perhaps you even smirked, you sly dog.

Well, to paraphrase Stewie, our uppence has come.

What was once an orderly routine that had our child in bed by 8 or 9 and left us with hours upon hours to accomplish tasks, retell stories from our day, and work on a room-sized miniature version of our town, has now devolved into what amounts to a frantic crapshoot, leaving all three of us tired, frustrated, and our miniature town infested with Beetlejuices and Indians in the cupboard.

These problems appear to be cyclical for us – once we feel like we’ve figured out what the “stresser” is – be it a drafty house, a painful vaccination, or tragically poor arrival time of traveling yodelers) – and she returns to normal sleeping habits, something else comes along and stirs up the issue again.  We’ve gone through several iterations of these, and have done everything from installing new windows to forming vigilante groups to “handle” the yodeling folks, each with varying degrees of success.

The recent flareup has been somewhat unique. Essentially we follow the usual routine of feeding at 6, bathtime at 6:30, squash lesson at 7, stories and bedtime at 7:30.  She usually goes down without too much trouble, and we enjoy 45 minutes or so of blissful silence, long ago having turned off the sound on the TV, to the point where I can’t even watch without closed captioning turned on.  Then, she awakes.  Dramatically.  Like Psycho the shower scene dramatically.

We take turns trying to console her, hopefully getting her back down in 20 minutes or so on a good night.  On a bad night, she doesn’t go back down, instead joining us downstairs to rob of us of any semblance of adult life that we might have, and forcing us to endure the masterful puppetry of Baby Einstein, a set of DVDs that destroys the very souls of parents who have to watch them.

Assuming we are able to get her back down, we then attempt to return to our normal activities, and eventually decide to head to bed.  We get ready quietly, using the downstairs toilet and brushing our teeth as quietly as possible.  I try not to scrape the shovel while cleaning out the stables and Kim does her nightly pre-bedtime bugling with a mute firmly in place.  Finally, we climb into bed and at the very moment when our minds are ready to shift into a dreamy neutral, the crying begins anew.

She knows.  I’m sure of it.  She’s craftier than I give her credit for.

So the comforting and nursing begins again, as we try all the tricks in the book to get her back down.  Sometimes we are not successful, and we have to bring her into bed with us so that she’ll calm down enough to sleep.  Occasionally we have to rot our brains with Baby Einstein in bed as both Kim and I drift off while Justine intently stares at a sock with eyes.  And then there are those precious few times these days where we are actually able to get her back down in her crib, her music playing softly, humidifier silently spouting it’s watery goodness.  We silently back away, overjoyed that we may enjoy a restful night sleep.

That’s when the cat meows.  Loudly.

The Best Medicine

One of the great joys of parenthood (beyond the significant tax benefits) is deciphering the mystical code that elicits that angelic sound: baby laughter.  In my compendium of sounds [The Frantz Audiofon], baby laughter definitely ranks in the top ten, standing tall besides the greats of kitty mews and the voice of Bronson Pinchot, specifically as voiced in Perfect Strangers.  It’s so amazing that occasionally we’ll call folks during a Justine laughing fit and not say anything at all, instead letting the power of baby laughter reach through the phone and envelop the listener.

I’m happy to report that Justine’s first laughter that wasn’t in her sleep (which, I assume, was only because she was dreaming about my legendary wit) was elicited by me only a few months into her young life.  Way back then (like, 6 months ago), getting the laughter from Justine was a mostly random affair, and when it did happen, the conversation always went like this:

Kim:  Was that her laughing?

Mark:  Possibly.  Or she’s coughing.

Kim:  Well, what did you do?

Mark:  Blew my nose.

Kim:  Hmmm.

The first laugh I can recall came as a result of me throwing something up in the air and catching it.  Admittedly, this is an amazing feat for anyone to accomplish, and the fact that I was doing it, and doing it REPEATEDLY must’ve struck a chord with her, and the laughter literally and slowly bubbled out of her.  Or she was sick.  Hard to say.
As time marched on, we started to identify certain things that would stoke the laughter from our young daughter.  Kim discovered the classic “tummy raspberry” during a diaper change could get her going, and that Cookie Monster is a definite winner.  Recently, we discovered that when Kim says the word “No” and shakes her head, Justine breaks down into hysterical laughter.  This does not bode well for the future.

I have a method to generating laughter – I call it “the Windup.”  It can be done several different ways, but it basically consists of three parts, repeated over and over again.  The first step is to gather some object that can be easily tossed in the air.  I’ve used plastic balls, shirts, cats, etc.  Safety is certainly a factor, so at this point the clubs are not set aflame.  The second step is to touch said object to Justine’s nose, and then toss it in the air.  Catch it, touch her nose, throw it in the air.  Repeat ad infinitum.  Finally, some sort of sound effect needs to be added to denote the rhythm of the whole thing – I tend towards the boops, but occasionally will go with an eek or a wahwah.

At first, she’ll smile, a little surprised to have something touch her nose.  Then, as the process is repeated over and over, she just starts bursting into unbridled laughing happiness, the kind of laughter that warms your heart, brought down the Berlin Wall and blew up the second Death Star.

There is a catch though – I’ve discovered that she finds the whole thing amazingly hilarious as long as you achieve perfection in doing it.  The moment you drop the ball or miss her face, the laughter stops.  The wide smile trims back to a polite “how nice,” and the enthusiasm drops from unbridled to bemused.  It is possible to re-stoke the laughter, but it requires the slow build-up again.

I’ve got to face facts – there’s a small chance that my daughter is a perfectionist – something I most certainly am not.  While there are many career paths available to perfectionists (gymnastics judge, figure skating judge, equestrian judge, etc.) it still worries me that she may be in for a rough life, especially living with me.

Then again, she still craps in her diaper and sits in it, so she can’t want everything perfect.