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Nathan utterly surprised me today.

We’ve been reading Snuggle Puppy every night as part of our bedtime routine. This is harder than it sounds, as part of it is supposed to be sung, so I had to make up a tune out of my head, not one of my better skills. Still, he seems to love it.

Our routine is, I put him in the crib with his sippy cup (he’s not a lap-baby in any way) and he drinks it while I sit on the floor next to the crib and hold the book up while I sing/read it to him.

Last week, we noticed him picking up various random books and holding them up, gabbling some baby words and making kissing noises, like he was reading them to someone. We thought it was cute, but just a sort of random copying behavior.

Today, he showed us just how much he understands. Before bedtime, he picked up the Snuggle Puppy book and turned the pages, and gave me his version of it…down to the “oo’s” and kissy noises, which are part of the song you’re supposed to sing…and he made the noises on the right page! Seeing him go “Lalalala…oooo…” and then blow a kiss on cue is just amazing. He can read! Sort of! Or at least, knows the story cues and has figured out how to imitate some of them!

I know, other parents think this is routine, blah-de-blah. But what Nathan knows or doesn’t know is still so mysterious to us, since he doesn’t speak our language, and so we very seldom are sure that he’s understanding or absorbing what we say and do. Today, it feels like he really communicated with me for the first time, and it just blew me away.

I still wonder about his talking, and if therapy might be of some use, because he does get frustrated when he can’t communicate with us, and it’s clear he has a lot to say. He will probably figure out how in his own way, but if we can help him make it easier, I wouldn’t mind at all. I would love one day soon for him to correct me when I get a story wrong, or be able to tell me what comes next, to find out what he really likes or doesn’t like, or hear what he is thinking about when he stares solemnly out the window.

This stage feels a little like the weeks before he was born, when we knew so much about him yet longed to see his face, hear his voice, hold him, smell him, get to know him for real instead of in theory. Now it’s not his little face, but his little mind, that we’re eager to meet. Because that’s when the fun really starts, isn’t it?

I realized some things about Nathan today, the first day we’ve spent alone together for a while.

1. He’s not on track when it comes to talking. According to what charts I’ve been able to find, he should have more than the maybe 10 words we can make out by now, at 22 months. He doesn’t form sentences, or use his words to ask for things. He doesn’t imitate us when we point and tell him words for things. He doesn’t respond verbally or point to “where’s Daddy?” or other similar questions. He does talk, incessantly, in a conversational kind of pattern, but uses “nananana”, “dukadukadukaduka” and other syllables over and over. He never even had a word for “bottle” or “milk” or any kind of food, and well, I guess I just hadn’t let myself notice till today that this wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing. I don’t know how much to be worried, yet; you hear stories of “my kid never talked till he was 3!” and that might just be all it is. But if he’s having trouble and needs help, I want to get it for him, at least find out what could be causing it. He should at least have his hearing checked, though he seems to hear fine. Sometimes he does ignore us, but I can’t tell if it’s because he doesn’t hear or just isn’t paying attention. Time to bring in the experts.

2. He is such a sweet and funny kid, and so engaged; he flirts constantly, laughs all the time, and can be amazingly cuddly. And then sometimes he’s a monster grouch. But really, even his grouchiest mood is short-lived; even when he’s sick, or tired, you can usually make him giggle, or he’ll have little flashes of happiness in between the bitching. Today we worked on spoon feeding, which his father and I have neglected because he was so happy with finger foods. He did fine for a while with the yogurt, scooping, kinda, with his spoon and getting it mostly in his mouth. But then, in defiance of all the laws of physics, he decided he could eat yogurt better with his hands. And he did, although I didn’t appreciate him wiping his hands through his hair. Though he remembered to keep hold of his spoon, all the same.

…i.e., Giant Insurance Company (that you’ve heard of). After a day of orientation, these are my thoughts:

1. Why do CEOs with many millions in the bank insist on wearing toupees at all, much less highly-improbable, resembles-flattened-roadkill ones? I mean…they’re insanely rich. Who’s going to call them out for being bald? They could shave their heads and polish them silver if they wanted…no one would say boo. Mystifying.

2. Have no new incidental-music riffs been written for corporate videos in 20 years? The video was new, but I’ve been hearing that lite-jazz KrappenMusik in every bank and airport since I was a teenager. Starving musicians perish in the streets, but no one can ask them to write some simple guitar riffs or keyboard melodies?

3. I had forgotten how it felt to be absorbed into a truly humongous corporation. People work here all their working lives, meet their spouses here, get their kids jobs here. The have a credit union, an in-house law office you can use for wills, etc., and some pretty sweet benefits. They still have a pension plan! There’s a gigantic cafeteria with more menu items than your average restaurant, so you never have to leave for lunch. And of course, two full days of training for new employees. Knowing what I do about the rest of the corporate world, which tends to have you fill out your tax forms, drop you at a desk, and say “good luck,” it’s strange and kind of endearing. I rant about work/life balance all the time; this is the old-fashioned solution, which is making work a sort of family-substitute, or like a college; you go home to visit, but all your daily needs get met there, if you want them to.

4. It feels both nice and a little weird to realize how much they care about employees being healthy. We got our own pedometers, invitations to join one of the in-house Weight Watchers groups, a discount at the local gym, and an absolutely serious lecture on ergonomics that included the first time ever someone has shown me how to work all the knobs and levers on an office chair. There are cash reimbursements for things like running shoes and exercise equipment if you join one program. All awesome, yes? Except that you can’t help thinking, “They want me to be healthy because they’re an insurance company and they don’t want to spend any money on my hospital bills.” It’s like when your Mom fusses at you to get a good education; you know she cares, but you also know she doesn’t want you living in her basement and working at the Sack n’ Go.

Tomorrow: HIPAA training. Which I promise not to bore you with.

Also, I surfed a few job sites just for giggles, and saw the place I worked for last week was advertising for the position they had hinted they might consider me for. I’m so glad they never made me an offer before I realized what a crazy bin that place was. Godspeed to whatever poor soul they manage to rope in to it.

I am not a midwife. I’m not even a midwife in training, yet. I’m not a birth educator, nurse, or EMT. I am only someone with an obsessive interest in birth and birth rights, and access to Teh Internets.

I just feel the need to post that here, to remind myself, not to go out on limbs and diagnose other women, pre- or post-partum. Sometimes I get into Internet discussions, where the ignorance and need for knowledge is so profound, and no one else is answering the woman’s confusion. And I just want to leap right in like Superman and tell her what she needs to do. And I have had to learn to take a deep breath, provide links to actual midwives, like the ones on my blogroll, and qualify everything I say.

I think, so far, I’ve kept on the right side of the line, but I don’t want to cross it and give someone unqualified advice. I don’t want a woman’s question to go unanswered either, because I know how agonizing it is to be pregnant and be confused because whatever you’re going through isn’t in the books. And no one you know who’s had kids seems to remember or have paid attention to stuff like that, and tells you to leave it all up to your doctor. Who is vague, and who may not be being entirely honest with you. It makes you feel crazy, especially considering all the hormones you’re also dealing with. Not fun.

It’s hard to pick and choose what I say, not to be flattered when women actually ask for my input, because…I am not not NOT an expert. What I don’t know FAR exceeds what I do. It’s a sad commentary on the lack of knowledge most of us women have about our own damn bodies that someone like me can even be regarded that way. I shouldn’t be. Most of what I know now should be common knowledge, taught in health class, talked about frankly on TV, movies, in books. Every woman who will birth, which is about 80% of women, should know what it looks like in its natural state, what it feels like, how it affects our bodies, long before we ever get pregnant. It’s one of the biggest experiences in a woman’s life, and it’s completely ignored unless it’s being used as a lame plot device in a sitcom or movie. That hobbyhorse of “real literature”, the First Sexual Experience, pales in comparison, to tell you the truth. You don’t usually have to face your fear of imminent death during that one, for one thing.

I blame the patriarchy, as I so often do, that this life-altering experience gets less attention in our culture than some teenager’s first time Doing It, because birth only happens to women, and is therefore Not Worth Discussing, or worse, Icky.

At any rate, I have miles to go before I certify, and while I really love telling women the things that OBs and books don’t about birth and their bodies, I don’t want to run their lives or diagnose their problems. I want to point them in the right general direction and then refer them to those who’ve already traveled that path and understood in detail the things I that I kinda-sorta-not really understand.