do you have any peas, please?
Did you ever notice that when someone is trying to understand how small a baby is she doesn’t look at the baby? She looks instead at the baby’s hands or feet, tiny little fingers and toes, to get the full impact of smallness.
It is the same thing with me about bigness.
I cannot look directly at Katya and grasp how much bigger, older, cleverer, abler, grown-uper, understandinger she is than she was. When I look at Katya, I see Katya. I am often delighted and amazed at how much she can do and how many new things she has learned. But, I cannot feel the impact of the change in the moment.
It is at completely other times when I feel staggered at how much she has grown. For example, I felt it when I was cleaning out the bib and burp cloth drawer. All the little bibs, with their breast-milk and formula stains, that were absolutely indispensible for months and months when Katya was a little milk monster and even after for her first forays into solid foods, all those little bibs: we don’t need them anymore. How did that happen? How is it that we can now use that drawer for candles and slides?
We have had to put up gates on the stairs, clear off all our low shelves, and carefully guard our garbage cans and electrical cords. We put all the walkers away. We don’t have to stay at alert to protect our toes from the walker wheels anymore. We don’t have to lift the walker up and down the step from the kitchen to the sun room, from the kitchen to the dining room. We can’t just put baby in the walker with grapes and cheerios and relax for twenty minutes.
It is the changes in our daily life and rituals which make us feel the immensity of the time which has elapsed.
I haven’t written recently (or more accurately “finished writing” anything) because the changes are so fast and yet so gradual. Katya is walking, walking, walking. She can go anywhere now. Her head is always bobbing up and down around the apartment. She likes to walk then squat, walk then squat, walk then squat. The other day I found her with cat food in both hands, with a butter knife, a carrot peeler, and with her hands in the garbage can.
Just today she started to shake her head “nooooo.” She does it with a joyfully mischievous smile. It is the growing consensus that she is going to be a rare handful. It is not that she is badly behaved. She is, more often than not, beautifully behaved. But she has a kind of utterly patient determination which makes you worry a little. As her grandmother says “she does not like to be thwarted.”
She got her first “punishment” (a little slap on the butt) for knocking a plant on the ground (for the nth time).
She is able to say more and more these days, recently with signs rather than new words. She does a superb “eat” sign now and a great “more.” Tonight she tried to tell me that she wanted to see the train in the book by handing me the book at making the “train” sign. She is getting better and better at letting us know that her teeth hurt and she wants some medicine. (She has somewhere between 7 and 10 teeth. She is not super cooperative about giving us a look in her mouth.) She recently asked grandma to change her diaper using the “change diaper” sign and we still argue with her about whether an airplane is an airplane or a helicopter. We are just starting to teach her the sign for “squirrel” (we use with Russian work “belka” with her because we think she will pick it up much faster), “butterfly” and “pain.”
Her verbal progress mostly involves humming and rhythm these days. She walks around going “Mmm mmm MMM, Mmm mmm MMM, Mmm mmm MMM” and “hmm hmm hmm” to the tune of “This Old Man.” (You know: This old man, he played one, he played knick knack on my thumb….” She never gets past “This old man.” So she hums: “This old man, this old man, this old man…”) She is great at copying intonations and will repeat a phrase with nonsense words but the absolutely correct intonation.
Right now she is sleeping. She is getting her top molars and she has been quite fragile all week – more hugging and crying than usual. You can feel that her top gums are both completely swollen in the back. Poor thing.
But, if you really want to please her, regardless of what small catastrophe may have just befallen her tired little self, all you have to do is ask her, “Do you have any peas, please?” and her face will break out in a little smile and she will put her face forward for a kiss.