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We should have known when he stopped sleeping through the night for a week or so. The baby books warn you that sudden sleeplessness is either illness or growing of new skills. Kind of like when the lady in Species would go to sleep and wake up 10 years older. But not so prone to killing people.

Anyway. My often-silent boy of few words talks now. He says hi, bye, please, thank you, and people’s names. He repeats things (time to find more cursing euphemisms, Mom and Dad). He struggles to use words instead of gestures or simple shrieking to request things, or even just to hold conversations that only he understands. (Judging by the laughter, these are apparently hilarious, we’re just not getting the jokes.) He experiments with sentences; “Geen mee go. Red mee shop.” at the stoplights. He prompts us to run through Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See, which we’ve memorized, an 8 millionth time.

Other new skills; “running”, colors, some counting in English and Spanish, sliding by himself, making Playdoh snakes, brushing his teeth, and climbing/falling out of his crib and giving his parents a heart attack. Making kissing noises when we talk about one little girl in his preschool class.

Like crawling, like walking, with speaking he has waited until almost the last minute, almost the point at which dr.’s start recommending a therapist, to suddenly jump into his new skills. And it’s a pattern I recognize, the way I learn, which is a long curve of nothing much with suddenly waking up one day going Oh, now I get it. I am doing that at my job right now, actually; I have had spectacular screwups and a lot of general confusion long enough that I sensed my boss being concerned, but now, I am starting to feel some competence kick in.

The kicker, of course (Nathan, not my boss) was when he told me “I duv yuu.” Not that he necessarily has much inkling what it means, but Lord, just melt me with the heat of your cuteness, why don’t you? He is a relentless cuddler, a bit of a clingy monkey, especially to his dad, and a real pest to older boys, whom he adores. At the bookstore today, he grabbed a manga book from a stack next to a preteen boy that was reading them, and elbowed practically into the boys’ face to show HE could read too, by golly! The kid was peeved, and I apologized and tried not to laugh. It’s a long way until Nathan is a sullen preteen rolling his eyes at the toddlers, but it’s getting shorter all the time. Which makes me not get so anxious about my son still being uninsterested in eating with utensils or potty training. All I have to do is keep an eye out for the next set of sleepless nights.

…and I’ve been the bad absent blogger. I think it’s just that a lot of what’s in my head hasn’t been post-able. We’ve been sick, we’ve been busy, blah blah boring cakes. February is like that though…a long blah month with Valentine’s Day a sort of forced-happy-but-not-really holiday in the middle. Never cared for Valentine’s all that much; I like chocolate, but not creme-filled, and I’m not a huge fan of roses, and pink and lacy isn’t ever me. So we mostly didn’t do much, except Matt did make me a hysterically funny homemade card, which helped.

Nathan is out of all things 2T entirely, and a lot of the 3T shirts. At 27 months old. Yikes. But he is still so cute, as you can see from his photo above. (No, I didn’t take that, wish I did; we hired a professional.) I’ve taught him how to do some dancing, or at least rapid stomping to music, which is of course adorable. Then tonight I grabbed his hands to make him dance *with* me, and he just thought that was hilarious. Two people dancing! Holding hands! Whatever will she think of next, that wacky mama! He laughed so hard he stopped dancing and fell to the floor, hanging from my arms, and of course, that was funny too.

As for me, I’m busy at work and still talking to my therapist, and that’s all I know. I’m pretty depressed at the moment for reasons too complicated to describe, but at least I know I’m trying. For February, that’s usually the best I can do.

Courtesy chippenziedeutch via Flickr Creative Commons license. Not our baby, but cute, no?

Colors: lello, red, boo, geen.

Food: onj, cacker, nomnom* (any tasty food), meeyuk (milk), momaar (more milk, or just more), shee-shee (cheese)

Things: buk (book), pane or ehpane (airplane), fy (fly), A-A-A (ABCs), moon, star, bat (bath), dog or wuff wuff, sock, shoo shoo (shoes), zzzzz (zipper)

Cuteness set to: MAXIMUM

*yes we use too much LOLspeak around the house.

It is the 21st century, right? Because I just had to comment on an (otherwise level-headed) parenting blog about the fact that worrying about what astrological sign your child is born under is bunk. People were all concerned! “Oh yeah, if he’s a Leo, you’re in for a rough go. My little Virgo is an easy kid.”

Bha-wha? Now I understand astrology-as-parlor-game, trying to see if you can make yourself fit into it and reading your horoscope. Using it to decide when to buy a lottery ticket (it’s as good an indicator as anything else for that, which is to say, your odds are the same either way). But actually being worried about your unborn kid’s future personality because they’ll be born under a day associated with a certain constellation?

Pregnancy has many things to worry about–maybe the kid will get your dad’s huge schnozz, or your spouse’s annoying habit of sucking his teeth, or your horrible teenage acne. Or more serious inheritable traits like heart problems and depression. All of these worries are connected to actual reality in some way.

As opposed to worrying if your child will be too prone to folding their socks precisely, or stealing cars, because they were born on the wrong day.

Like I said, superstitions can be fun, especially when you’re a kid and you actually make up your own (step on a crack, break your momma’s back; yelling “Jinx!”, etc.) Wearing your lucky shirt to job interviews may give you more confidence, even if you know deep down that there’s no magic. It’s generally a good idea not to walk under ladders anyway. Using little mental games and tricks can be one way of dealing with the randomness of life, provided you don’t take it too seriously.

But if I were someone on a major parenting blog, posting about actually being worried that my kid would be born under the wrong sign…that’s just sad.

Baby babble is kind of like static–you hear nothing but noise, nothing but “bababababa, lalalala loo loo loo, eeeeeAAAAAA!” several hours a day, and you think, it might mean something. And you transmit back, “Roger that: see? Book! Apple! Daddy! Chair! Look, kitty! Kitty goes Meow! Cow goes moo!”

And you may get completely ignored, get radio silence, accompanied by an enigmatic smile, or you might get more babble. Did it sink in? You have no idea.

Even worse, sometimes something does come through. “Aaaahpul.” “Neow!” “Yay!” but then isn’t repeated for months, or ever again.

The baby guides all act as though this is a linear process. “A child begins babblilng at 8 or 9 months. Soon they are saying individual words. By age two, he or she is creating simple sentences, such as ‘daddy go bye-bye.’”

I’m starting to suspect that, as in so many other cases, a simple linear process may not in fact describe child development very well.

My enigmatic, nonsense-babbling child said suddenly this week “I eat now.” He pointed emphatically to the table, and when we brought him food, he wolfed it down. He’s said it several other times on the way to school, mostly because we let them serve him breakfast and he doesn’t like having to wait till we get there to eat.

What the hey? He’s never said “I” “eat” or “now” in my presence or his father’s. I guess he’s taking the phrasebook approach to learning English, maybe. Tomorrow he may ask “Where is bathroom please? I wish to order a sandwich. Can you tell me when this train arrives?”

Anyway, he still babbles his static, but more frequently now, you can hear faint traces of speech coming through, broadcast from the other side of the moon. Hi, Daddy! Sock sock sock! Shoooe! Skuuuh (school). He tries to imitate us, but his accent is thick and clumsy still. We don’t speak his native tongue, and he’s reluctantly decided he has to try ours. For toddlers, I suppose whatever life they get is like a foreign-language immersion program.

He’s still taking his time. There are still 18-month olds who say a lot more than he does. But then, neither his father nor I are what you’d call early adopters. We were slow to get CD players, cell phones, non-ancient computers, or to take up IM. We were doing fine, without, after all. Let the other eager types get all hyper. We’d wait and see. And it’s quite possible that this explains far more about our child than the development charts. He just wasn’t sure about this new-fangled practice of using language to communicate. He’s only two, but already he may be a grumpy old man.

And that’s fine. We’re keeping an eye on him to make sure there isn’t a real problem. In the meantime, we’ve got our ears on, good buddy. That’s a 10-4, c’mon back.

Updated link to the list, per comments below, from the original author.

For the record, I won’t homeschool unless absolutely driven to it (i.e., if all the available schools for Nathan were awful). Because I really am not cut out for it. But I have sometimes wished I was, and admire many of those who do.

Ok, here’s the list.

The Bitter Homeschooler’s Wish List:(From Secular Homeschooling Magazine, Issue #1)

1. Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals,would we admit it?

2. Learn what the words “socialize” and”socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.

3. Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice,baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.

4. Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.

5. If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality”show, the above goes double.

6. Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birthstory you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.

7. We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.

8. Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.

9. Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.

10. We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.

11. Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send mychild to school.

12. If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.

13. Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house.We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.

14. Stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours everyday, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.

15. Stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.

16. Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.

17. Stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Evenif you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you anymore.

18. If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.

19. Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else. (considering I dont boss anyone around, this dosent really apply to our family)

20. Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.

21. Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.

22. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.

23. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.

24. Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.

25. Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

It’s been two years since Nathan’s birth. I guess there are days I don’t think about it; being as involved in birth issues as I am, though, that’s pretty rare.

I’m still angry. Laid-back, non-grudge-holding me, still wishing she could go back and scream and strike out at the people who hurt her, lied to her, who denied her and her son a good birth, c/sec or no. Because believe it or not, it’s not just about the surgery. It’s about all that came after, too.

There was no reason to take my baby from me for six hours, while he screamed and I pleaded pitifully, begged and wept for someone to bring him to me. None. There was no reason to forbid me visitors in recovery, so that my doula had to sneak in to hold my hand for fifteen lousy minutes. There was no reason someone could not have stayed with me and Nathan in my room after visiting hours, so that I could have help lifting and feeding him without tearing my scar. There was no reason for that suffering.

There was no reason for Nathan to be given sugar water instead of my milk right after birth, no reason he could not have been put next to my skin, held between his daddy and me while I recovered. For that six hours, he was in a cold, comfortless world, and he screamed bloody murder, as well he should. And my heart ripped in two, and I’m not sure it’s back together yet.

It took us a long time to bond, to get back to a peaceful place, after that. A long time for the memory to fade, for us to find our way together. Some things, like breastfeeding, we never did find a way back to. A long time for us to be mamababy, together and content.

Today Nathan was sick, and wanted comforting after a particularly bad spell of diarrhea. He’s a big boy, but I sat on the floor and held him in my lap, his ear on my heart, while he drank his milk, and rocked him and calmed him down. I made a little safe world for him to be in while he was hurting and scared, a refuge from the bad things he didn’t understand.

It worked today; it would have worked then too.

If we’d only gotten the chance.

Two is: tall and weighs 38 pounds, and wears a size 8.5 boy’s shoe.

Two has: big white teeth and a huge grin, when he wants something, or when he’s trying to get your attention.

Two says the following words: apple, nose, Hi, Bye-bye, Dora, Ola, dog, Mama, Dahdah, Yay. But Two knows a lot more words he either can’t say or doesn’t need to.

Two has a love/hate relationship with: baths, naps and bedtime, food, being carried.

Two has silky brown hair that: gets into his eyes because he hates getting it trimmed. But Two’s mama can’t stand the thought of buzzcutting him, so for now he keeps his shaggy baby mullet.

Two will cry at: the sound of hair dryers and vacuum cleaners.

Two will laugh at: puppets, his father’s pointy-finger dance, the feel of ice cubes, and people who put blankets over their heads.

Two has no lovey except: his sippy cup, and never has.

Two practices: passive resistance and going limp when you’re taking him where he doesn’t want to go. Also using Daddy as his jungle gym.

Two has learned to: receive kisses but not to give them, that you must pet kitties gently, how to take off his shirt, how to climb into his own car seat.

Two has not yet learned: how to eat with utensils, why you can’t lie down in the middle of the street, to like chocolate, to go potty in the toilet, or how to get out of his crib–yet.

Two smells: mostly delicious, except when he doesn’t.

Two’s voice sounds: high and soft, squealy and giggly, and every now and then, growly like a dinosaur or a lion.

Two’s eyes: have changed from blue to green, and kept their long eyelashes. They light up when they see his daddy, and droop at bedtime no matter how hard he tries.

Two likes to wear: as little as possible, but also, his mommy’s shoes.

Two will celebrate his birthday by: eating cake and ice cream at his Mamaw’s house, surrounded by people who love him. And then taking a nap. Or not. You never know, with Two.

I read this post by a new mom, which I stumbled on while Googling midwife stuff.

This is the part that struck me;

Jonathon called my mom several times to come over and help with me. Not the baby, me. I didn’t even care. I felt like when she was there, I could go on. When I was alone, I couldn’t cope.

This panic feeling, for new moms and dads, is so, so common. We joke about it afterwards, even, but the sick feeling of falling, of doom hanging over your head, of even the simplest tasks looking impossible…I think most new parents must feel this. And every one of us want others around, to help us learn and cope, but we are mostly afraid to ask.

We are afraid because we are supposed to feel shame about wanting this help, as though we are trying to push off the responsibility of parenting on our own parents. And certainly that does happen. But is handing the baby over to the anxious couple and sending them home alone the best option? Is there some middle ground between dumping your baby on your parents and lying in bed with your heart pounding in complete terror, wishing there were someone, anyone, to help you learn how to keep this incredibly demanding fragile new life alive and healthy?

Tara had PPD, but even before she got any anti-depressants, she knew that she felt better with her own mom around. Was that part of her depression, or just a natural fear of the unknown, of overwhelming responsibility?

The nuclear family as an isolated unit is a strange way for humans to live; cut off from support, advice, and extra hands, two people are supposed to be everything to each other and sufficient to raise their own children without any help whatsoever.

This is not a slam at grandparents, by the way, or anyone else. Grandparents mostly have work of their own, or responsibiliies far away from their children, that don’t let them pitch in even as much as they’d like. And a better setup wouldn’t just be them, but a wider community of friends and extended family too. Yes, a village. I know. It’s a cliche. But oh, how I dreamed about that village when Nathan was tiny and I was desperately wishing for someone to talk to while I struggled with breastfeeding, someone I could swap babysitting with when one of us needed a nap, someone to help with dinner and housework, someone to tell me it was going to be ok. Our families did what they could, but we didn’t want to look like bad parents by asking too much (and we did ask a lot, anyway) and our support network was stretched too thin and far away to be there for us like that.

We got through, like most parents do, because it does get easier, and you do stop being terrified at some point. Because there was no alternative, and we just kept going on. And all the other parents that do the same, assume that this is the way it must be. But that just seems wrong to me. There’s going to be some suffering and fear and mistakes no matter what, as part of being a parent. But does it have to be so bad, does it have to push you so close to an edge that you’re afraid to look at directly, for fear you’ll fall over?

I think that’s a question worth asking.

And normally, she is too hip and hyper for me to relate to very much. But she got this bit right:

…it wasn’t until Leta was about two years old that I grew into my identity as a mother, that I finally stopped feeling guilty and embraced my version of that role. I knew that I loved my child, that I would do anything for her, but that I don’t necessarily do this thing like many other women. And that’s okay. I am okay with being the mother who doesn’t get a thrill out of sitting on the floor and playing blocks for two hours. I am okay with being the mother who does not look forward to Little Gym. I’m okay with being the mother who lets her child go another day without a bath because tonight? I’m too tired tonight. I’m okay because I know that none of these things make me a bad person.

If it wasn’t for Matt, I’d be hosing Nathan off in the yard. Our tub skeeves me out*, so I have to clean it before I can bathe him in it, and I hate doing that…so he tends to skip baths. Fortunately his daddy doesn’t skeeve easily.

*How in God’s name do we produce so much hair? And why is hair so hard to clean up? Nothing grabs it! But every bit of it will float in the tub, and that just freaks me out. Which is why I never take baths. I wish Nathan would like showers more.