The Gender Police Strike Again (January 25, 2013)

By Kieran Slattery (Little Bug's sitter)

Today, Little Bug and I went to the Holyoke Children's Museum again, and had a great time. He slid down the slide, built ramps (large and small), sent boats through the water...

At any rate, toward the end of our trip, we wound up in the tot area, and he began playing with a four-year old girl - they were both jumping onto mats and doing somersaults, and he was having a blast. He was miming her actions and just being adorable, per usual.

At one point, she said, "Oh, can she do a jump like this?" 

And I smiled and said, "I'm not sure, you should ask him. Hey Bug, can you do a jump like that?"

And he responded, "YEAH!" 

So the girl shakes her head and vehemently replies, "Oh, NO. She's not a boy. She is a she." I politely corrected her, but she maintained that, indeed, "she" was a "she." She sputtered, "B-but...she..he...she has long hair!!" I, again, gently explained that boys could have long hair, too.

Finally, she went straight to the source, and faced him, demanding, "Are you a boy or a girl?" 

Little Bug, caught off guard, stammered, "I'm a...gir...boy! I'm a boy." 

She corrected him, saying, "No, you're not. You're a GIRL." 

Bug said firmly, "No. I'm a boy." They went back and forth for a few rounds, until our little guy, clearly exasperated and like, "Why the hell can't we just keep jumping and somersaulting? Why do we have to harping on this?" affirmed his gender for the umpteenth time and looked at me for backup. 

I said, "You're right, buddy. You're a boy." Trying to steer the conversation away from Bug, I smiled and teasingly said to her, "Are YOU a boy?" 

She looked at me like I was a moron and grabbed her earlobes, retorting, "No..I'm a girl...I have earrings, SEE?!" I nodded solemnly and thought it was a bad time to explain to her who George Michael was. (Oh - and then she points at us both and goes, "She's a girl, and you're a girl." Poor thing...I then had to explain that we were both boys. I thought she was going to explode with frustration). The upshot was that she finally walked away from us, settled into the rocking chair and surveyed us from afar, before returning and admitting, "Okay, you're right. I see now. He's a boy." and then: "Let's keep jumping!" 

I'm not sure what she "saw" that convinced her to finally accept Little Bug's gender, but I'd imagine it had something to do with the fact that she was sick of debating and really just wanted to keep playing with her new friend ; ) 

When we left, I scooped Bug up, gave him a huge hug and kiss and asked him if he was feeling okay and if he'd had a good time. His reply? "YEAH!" and then, "Kee-nan, I'm hungry. What kind of crackers you have for me?" 

I stopped worrying.

For Sandy Hook (written December 15, 2012)

Something really bad happened to Bug last weekend. I let him jump off a diving board in a friend's arms, and came up choking and crying. He had water up his nose and he swallowed it, an awful feeling I remember from my own childhood diving board accidents. It was a parenting mistake of the first order, mine. I held him in my arms as he cried out the misery of it, and then sat him on the side of the pool.

After less than a minute, he sneezed water all over my head, which made him laugh. As I marveled at his powers of resilience, I encouraged him to swim toward the end of the pool where our stuff was, since he wanted to and I thought it might do him good to have his last memory before we left be swimming, instead of that awful drowning feeling. He swam some, and paused to barf up the water he had swallowed. I called it "upchuck," which he thought was absolutely hilarious. I thanked what gods there be for his good humor and resilience, and wished, not for the first time, that I was as brave as he is.

I will not recover as quickly from the awful tragedy in Connecticut. Two family friends lost children in Newtown, and a niece remembers the principal of Sandy Hook elementary from when she was her high school principal in Danbury. This is the third mass shooting where I have lost people I knew, or been one person removed from. The first was a 2002 shooting at the University of Arizona, where I was teaching. An angry student killed three professors before killing himself. Because his body was not immediately found, however, we all spent hours believing there was a gunman loose on campus. The second shooting, the one that included Gabriel Giffords—well, everyone in Tucson knew someone. These tragedies feel cumulative, each one echoing the other down the corridor of memory. Perhaps that's external, too, as the media and even the gunmen quote the others.

After the hard, horrible day of absorbing the scope of the tragedy in Connecticut (and making sure Bug didn’t hear a word of it; there are some things I will try to protect him from), we took our little one to see Christmas lights at a nearby park. And as trite as it all was, including Santa and Mrs. Claus, there was comfort in its ordinariness, and his awe at the beauty of it. And so tonight I hold my baby close and mourn for all of us, for every parent who cannot hold their child, for all these guns we have set loose on the world, from Egypt to South Africa to Haiti to Guatemala and Mexico, and no less on ourselves.

What go in compost?

"What go in compost?" Bug asked me last night. On our recent visit to Tucson, there was much discussion of compost, as his Aunt Mimi had just started composting.

"Scraps from food you would otherwise throw in the trash," I said.

Little Bug lacks the vocabulary to out and out correct me. "What go in compost?' he asked again.

"Egg shells, coffee grounds, vegetable peels," I tried.

"What go in compost?"

I can't imagine parenting before the age of the instantly accessible YouTube "how-to" video. Bug spent much of the trip studying one on how to make a water fountain in your backyard.

"Do you want to find a how-to video on compost?" I ask.

Score. "La!" he says with great enthusiasm.

Sure enough, I have forgotten the brown stuff, the straw and dead leaves that compose the majority of a good compost. After we watch a while, he nods as they add the food scraps to the leaves. "That the trash," he points out, gently pointing out to me of the inadequacy of my answer.

It is humbling, this raising of a child. He reminds me, as all children remind their parents, of the insufficiency of what I know, and how quickly his curiosity can outstrip my map of the world.

We've been listening to The Nutcracker, as we did last year, in the vain hope that familiarity with the music will keep him engaged and in his seat next week when we go see his cousin dance in it. But as music has replaced trucks in his repertoire of obsessions, his interest in it has changed this year.

"What that?" he asks, pointing to his ear, asking what he is hearing.

"Those are the violins," I say, feeling mildly virtuous that I know the answer.

"What that?"

"Um, clarinets?" I'm on shaky ground. I'm not sure I have the ear for this.

"That tuba?" he asks. He loves tubas.

"Hmm, I think trombone? Maybe we should watch an orchestra play it on YouTube?"

"Laa!" Great enthusiasm. We learn that for some reason, it is mainly Japanese and Korean orchestras in the corner of YouTube that we find. Also that there appear to be no tubas in Tchaikovsky's score. Either that, or not in these particular orchestras. No matter. We begin a wild chase through Internet images of oboes and bassoons.

"What that?" he challenges Mama Jennifer when she comes over, pointing to a strange drawing we have found.

"An oboe?"

"Old Russian bassoon!!" he announces triumphantly. Show off.

 I still know a little more than he does about a few things, which is reassuring. His Aunt Ana and Michi gave him children's hand bells as a gift, and I line them up in a scale. He picks them up one by one. "What that sound called?"

"It's a C." I can still read better than he can.

I pick each one up and try to sing the note back. He follows suit. I feel like I'm winning, like I've taught him something, though I'm not sure what.

I remember surprisingly far back in my own early childhood, to almost his age. I remember something about this hunger for words and knowledge of things. He isn't at the "why" stage yet, but I remember how I loved that questioning of my parents, how satisfying it was that why questions had answers, and the world could be put in order. Later I learned that it couldn't, and that was tremendously disappointing.

Maybe music questions will keep him busy for a while. He has a lot of instruments, which he loves, so there's a coordination piece and a knowledge piece to keep him occupied. There's also clearly an emotion piece--he walks around singing happy tunes of his own invention, but if we ask him to identify what a piece of music makes him feel, he can say happy or sad or scared. Or maybe soon we'll be on to dinosaurs, and learning all their names. I do admit to being glad we're done with trucks, which were boring me silly, although I tried not to let on as he proudly named every construction vehicle on a site.

But I love his sturdy self-confidence that he can learn everything important about a subject, and when I'm not slightly annoyed, I am grateful for our access to Internet information streams that let him extend his questions beyond what we know.

Some things, though, you can't learn on the Web. The other night he was hanging on Jennifer's leg, and announced: "I love Mama Jennifer." He looked over at me, and added sweetly, "I love Mama Laura, too." Then he patted himself on his tummy. "And I love myself."

Oh Bug, I think, as I try not to let on that I've just teared up. I don't know where you came from, but I am so happy that you have that gift, that right now at least, so many things are working right for you.

Another Country

Susan Sontag once famously said that illness is another country. So too is childhood, or, better, it is a journey through a different place, populated quite differently than the more mundane dwelling places of ordinary adults. 

I have an absorbing an interesting job that I like a lot, but when I see Little Bug, I sometimes feel like I've wandered onto a livelier and certainly funnier planet. Yesterday Jennifer drove me and a colleague home, which put me in the back seat with a Bug who was completely uninterested in the grown-up conversation in the front seat. Soon he started moving his fingers and making funny sounds. 

"Are you playing a pretend trumpet?" I asked.

"Tuba," he explained.

"Like, whomp! Whomp?" I  asked

"Lup. Now, clarinet," he explained stretching out his fingers and making higher pitched sounds.

Then he made a sound that started high and went low, moving one hand down in a slide.

"That's a trombone!" I cheered.  

He chuckled. "Listen, Mama Laura. Trumpet," he added, wriggling his fingers and going high. 

He patted his legs rapidly and loudly. "That drums!"

How many adults get to ride home with a whole pretend marching band?

There's also the work of learning, mapping a whole world and at least one language, which seems to be happening so quickly I marvel that he has time to sleep. I don't know the actual number, but surely they learn three quarters of the words in a language before they ever start school. I've said this before, but early childhood learning puts college students to shame. 

Little Bug loves every word of it, and so we all turn into teachers in his presence (I found myself explaining how plumbing carries clean water into houses and waste water out before breakfast this morning, and Jennifer told him about the important role of hot water heaters if you want a bath. He was rapt.)

But the funniest part is how he also notices how the pedagogical role works. "What's this,  Mama Laura?" he asked, holding up a picture.

"That's a lobster," I answered cautiously, suspecting  from his tone that something was afoot.

"Good job, Mama Laura!" He pointed to his mouth. "Eat it. Yum!"

He got every part of the teacherly encounter in his gentle teasing.  Ask the question, evaluate and reward the answer, and then expand on the information. I was in hysterics. 

He did it again last night as he got me to accompany him on his drum with me playing the cymbals. He let me try for a while and then asked for them. "Try like this," he said, showing me how to lower one onto the edge of the other like finger cymbals. They did indeed make a sweeter sound, and he smiled encouragement at my efforts and went back to his drum.

Planet Bug is full of music, for sure, new words, and also other wonders. The full range of construction vehicles, pay loaders, cement mixers, excavators, bulldozers, crane trucks, and his beloved, the backhoe. 

It's the source of his really truly awful favorite 2-year old joke. "Bug, do you want soup or a bagel for lunch?" You say. "Backhoe," he says with a smart-ass look. Whoever writes parenting advice books that suggest giving your toddler forced choices to give them the illusion of control has clearly not contended with the fact of who really is in charge. Backhoe.

He's also adopted a sullen teen thing. "What did you do today?" I ask, hoping for something charming or at least interesting. "Nothing," he says, with a look that would be a smirk if he had more irony in him. Today I said,  "I want you to wear a hat today. It's cold out." 

"Whatever," he said back, only a shade less than sarcastic. 

Made me miss "Backhoe."

But mostly his landscape is still bright and funny, as even this mock-sullenness is played for laughs. It's part of becoming his own person, this defiance, as much as having his own personal favorite color (brown) and favorite number, or rather, related pair--"six upside down nine! Nine upside down six!" He doesn't tire of this marvel, even carrying around the floaty six and nine from the bathtub to demonstrate. "Six!" Flips it over. "Nine!"

He has his obsessions, which have moved on from fireworks to water fountains. Like fireworks after the Fourth of July, this is a slightly sad thing to love fiercely in New England with winter approaching. I offered to take him to his favorite park this weekend, but he answered wistfully, "No go Look Park. Little Bug sad water fountains off."

This other country he roams around in, and sometimes lets us visit, is above all is own--about the dinosaurs, the playdoh, the adventures in Mama Jennifer's stories of Bob the Backhoe, Dave the Dump Truck, and their good friend, Rocky Raccoon. Colors have alternate names--red can also be "Elmo," blue, "Cookie Monster," and yellow, you guessed it, "Big Bird." Whatever the educational television content of his imagination, he's made it his.  He eats pretend cupcakes--cookie monster color.

This is the wisdom I think of stories like Alice in Wonderland and songs like Puff the Magic Dragon. We wander around in this marvelous country for quite some time, until we are lured out by the foolish ambitious to become a grown up. When we try to go back, we find ourselves without the keys any longer. But this is what they don't tell you about parenthood: if you're lucky, you'll find a guide who will let you back in.

Little Bug Talking!

Little Bug and some friends.

  A friend who remembers Little Bug's first two weeks of life in NICU said recently, as we were talking about Bug's articulation disorder: he's just a bulldozer. He doesn't let anything stop him.
  Bug would undoubtedly like the metaphor; bulldozers follow closely behind backhoes as his favorite things on earth.
  But I was thinking about that as I finally got to read his 24-month language assessment from the speech therapist: she rated his language skills as above average for his age. It's hard to remember that he was hardly talking at all at 20 months, 4 words and a lot of animal sounds. And hundreds of signs.
  But I realized today how much he was listening all those months. I was reading a book to him, and he correctly identified all sorts of things I didn't know he had words for.
  "That sailboat."
  "Motorboat."
  "Rowboat."
  I turned the page. He did it again. "Oars, propeller, lighthouse."
  "Wow, little guy, you sure know a lot of words."
  "Little Bug talking!" he said, all proud.
  He wasn't just talking. He had a meta-narrative about this whole process, a name for this as a developmental stage in contrast with a previous one. Talking. And, I suspect, he'd also been listening all those months when he wasn't to the conversations about him not talking. I guess this was his announcement that we are done with all that.
  Then he added, "Little bug sitting on ottoman."
  Show off.

Happy boy

  You could make the case that these are just hard, cruel times, and by extension, that we are just a species riddled with meanness. Aggression, intimidation, and dishonesty are called "presidential-ness." Some businesses have turned to a "profit above all else" ethic--an employee at Bank of America recently told someone I know to lie about her income so she could stay on food stamps and pay the bank with her food money. While the average family lost 40% of their net income in the years  2007-10, some people turned a profit. The number of millionaires in the U.S. grew by 8% in the same period.
  But watching Little Bug reminds me that there is hope for us. Many things give him joy. The other day he spotted a VW bug, really looked at one for the first time, and laughed out loud, which reminded me that this was effectively the point of them, or was until they became some expensive retro status symbol. But they still are hilarious-looking cars.
  He loves his friends. He likes holding hands, hugging, kissing. This goes for human friends, dogs, and stuffed animals, too.
  Falling leaves make him jump up and down with excitement, and (as in the picture above) running with the last gone-to-seed dandelions of the season, found unexpectedly at a park near here, is unbelievably fun, especially if you are going down hill, get over your feet, and tumble into a giggling heap at the bottom.
  But the thing that most made me notice recently that humans are an astonishingly generous and kind species, too, was when I was lying on the bed with my ankle on a pillow, quite down in the mouth about a sprain. Bug grabbed his Raffi-Taffy stuffed dog, a Yorkie with a pink felt-lined zebra-striped jacket, and started gently walking him across my head. "Raffi-Taffy jump on Mama Laura!" he said, in the exact same trying-to-coax a smile voice you would use with a sick kid. "Oh! Fall off!" He laughed. He stroked my arm gently.
  I was struck by how different this was than his usual play. He's rarely a real pain, but often if I or we are trying to read or otherwise preoccupied, as I was then with my ankle, he'll try to entertain himself by exploring, eventually getting into something he shouldn't; he'll try to get our attention by messing with something or trying to get us to read to him or play a game. This wasn't any of that. He was trying to make me laugh.
  "Mickey jump with Jackson!" he said, wrapping his arms around the oversized Mickey Mouse doll his cousins had brought back from Disneyland the year before. He jumped on the bed, launching himself in the air and falling down. He was trying so hard I had to laugh. As I laughed, he did. Pretty soon he got down on the floor, throwing Mickey into the air and himself on the floor so he disappeared from my sight line on the bed. We had discovered Vaudeville's slipping on a bannana peel joke, right there in the bedroom. I laughed until I choked up. Here was this little guy, so full of empathy at two that he was incredibly invested in amusing me, a point that came home to me every time he got up, ruefully rubbing whatever part of his body he had landed on.
  I think this is a lot of the appeal of being around children, and why those of us who have them find them addictively interesting. Some exceptions notwithstanding, they almost all laugh. They make you laugh. They dance. They are the best cure for pessimism I have found.


 

Lup

At two, Little Bug is getting to be recognizably human at a dizzying pace. He brushes his teeth at the sink. He's considering using a potty (although after one humiliating episode in which he peed on the floor, neat-boy is reconsidering this. He looked up at me with soulful eyes under the masses of hair he's sprouted and said, very solemnly, "Whoops."). He's sleeping in the big-guy bed at nap time. He's building ridiculously huge sets of train tracks all over the living room--albeit with lots of help from Mama Jennifer.

But mostly--at last--he's talking! A lot of it is hilarious, and, sturdy and self-confident character that Bug is, he doesn't mind if we laugh. He laughs with us. Tonight at dinner it was "abamoof." And when we couldn't get it, he just got louder, like all good English-speakers, he assumed that if he just yelled everyone could understand him. He put his water glass down.

ABAMOOF! ABAMOOF! ABAMOOF!

As his volume increased, so did his speed, ABAMOOFABAMOOFABAMOOFABAMOOF!

We guessed a few things, but finally were reduced to hysterics by his insistence and complete incomprehensibility. Finally he pointed at the window. Inspired, or desperate, I said, "Are you saying, 'Half a moon?'"

"Yes! Half a moof!" He said it with great patience, as if he was trying to be good-natured with the idiots he was saddled with for parents. Somewhere in there the f's were interfering with each other, but that wasn't his problem.

My absolute favorite, gone  for a few weeks now sadly, was his word for bulldozer for a while: "Bordello." Clear as a bell. Also "L'amour" for his beloved toy, the lawnmower.

He's adding A's to the ends of lots of words, too. If he wants to scare you, he jumps out and says, "Boo-a!" The number after one is "two-a" and if you look at his foot you will see a "toe-a." Cracks me up.

The characters from Thomas the Tank Engine are taking up a lot of his imaginative energy, but he lacks a certain linguistic precision with their names. Gordon is Gorna, Percy is Pusu, and Duncan is Duncna. As his babysitter said, you sort of imagine Gordon and Gorna sneaking out on dates.

He's also taken to announcing to the strangers who ask (including Dora the Explorer) that his name is Jack. While I've taken pains to not use his name in this public blog, it's not Jack. He has his own private life going on, apparently, under the name of Jack.

That's not his only invention. Tonight he announced that he was a backhoe. Named Jackhoe. Oh, the tabloid Michael Jackson jokes that ran horribly through my mind. 

He's also got a problem with terminal O's. They just go on and on. Cheerioo-o-o-o-s. Risotto is Ris-to-o-o-o-o.

And one I fear he'll never lose, because we've all taken it up, is "la" for yes. It was one of his first words, but he's not fixed it. Instead, he's adding to it. Recently, he's picked up an ever-so-casual "yup." Except he says it "lup." Now we all walk around saying "lup."

Context is still everything with understanding him, as with little kids generally I think. When he did his speech evaluation last week, one of the things he had to do was respond to a whole lot of language prompts in a book. It was kind of mean--drop a curious guy in the middle of a room with toys everywhere, mostly at eye-level, and then ask him to sit at a table in a chair and look at cartoonish drawings of kids doing boring things. As we kept trying to redirect him to the book, I thought, exasperated, about the parents who feel like school-teachers unfairly identify their kids as ADHD. Really, I wanted to argue with the speech therapist, he's two. Let him play with your trucks and doll house.

Finally, he got some of his attention directed at the exam instrument. "This boy is hungry! What should he do!" asked the therapist, Bev.

Bug wanted to help her. He's a good guy, and she seemed so excited. "Eat," he said.

"This girl is cold! What should she do!"

Wound up by all the exclamation points in her tone, he tried to match her. "Backhoe shirt!" he shouted.

Mamas cracked up, while Bev looked completely puzzled. "He's got a long-sleeved shirt with a backhoe on it," we said, when we could stop laughing. "It's what he wears when it gets cold."

"This boy is tired! What should he do!"

"Na-Na!" (nurse--so he can fall asleep.)

I have no idea how she coded that one.

One thing I'm sure of is that he failed all the prompts for a gerund, an -ing word. We weren't surprised. We hadn't heard one.

One minute after we got home, he repeated something I had said months ago were the important rules:

"No fighting, no biting, no hitting, no spitting."

Seriously, dude, you couldn't have said that five minutes earlier? You don't know that your mamas are achievers and that was a test? He spent the rest of the day riffing with gerunds. He stuck his head in the office--"Mama working!" He'd announce, "Running!" as he went off to do some. "Barking" of the dog. It was torture.

But the good news in all this mangled English is that it's where he should be, or close enough. The speech therapist wants to see us back in six months, but no speech therapy, no need to worry about an articulation disorder, at least not at the moment. And that is good news indeed. Lup. Sure is.