Piper Tells a Story: 1 (01:57)

Piper Tells a Story: 2 (01:09)

Phrases that I’ll need to ask Piper about more later: “she munched a quarter and it bing-ding-dinged,” “in pajamas like a pea,” “had her juice on her little … painted … um … orangey table.”

I picked P up from her day care late this afternoon, whistling as I walk in the door. Any time I walk into a space in which Kate or Piper can hear me, I give the same little three note whistle I’ve used for years to announce myself — tonic, dominant, major-third. Piper hears this and comes excitedly running out to meet me.  She pauses for a second, looking past me for Kate before I explain that her mom’s at work tonight, and that we’ll be having dinner as a twosome. She’s psyched to head out, though, and so I gather the day’s masterpieces (unfinished raviolis in her lunch bag and a scrawled-on picture of a squirrel, HELLO JACKSON POLLACK) and bundle her into her purple coat.  She says goodbye to Emily, the afternoon caretaker, with a cheery “Shabbat Shalom!” — I’m guessing Piper is likely the only kid being raised by two Quaker parents who knows to say that on Fridays, but when you’re attending a day care named Gan HaYeled, this is perhaps unsurprising, and totally charming — and we run out to the car with a rain squall bearing down on us overhead.

We drive home, Piper pointing out stop signs and busses, and telling me when lights have turned green. We get a brief, blatting shower as we park, and Piper insists that she can hold the umbrella as we walk up to our front door … and she’s right. Holding it upright and going up the steps proves a challenge, though, so I take the umbrella down and we both burst in the door dripping. We marvel at the new couch and chairs, which showed up only this morning, and then I go to transmute several days of base-metal leftovers into one new golden meal for the two of us. Piper leans on the new couch, ransacks her room, rummages through some kitchen cabinets, and finally settles down on the kitchen floor to recite Maurice Sendak’s “Chicken Soup with Rice” to me.

Meanwhile I’m chopping up a shallot; some leftover cooked chicken from the batch we raised, killed and butchered this summer; and a bunch of broccoli. I sautée the shallot with some garlic, and Piper asks to smell the garlic.  Then she wants to smell (and sample) the chicken. Then she wants to watch me stir the rice in.  As I fetch out the usual bottles to jazz up the stir fry, she requests a taste of each and its name: soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, sesame oil.

We sit down at the table and I serve her a big scoop of the fried-rice-and-stuff; on a whim, I put a few drops of each of the four seasonings on her plate, too.  She spends easily the first five minutes of the meal dipping an index finger into each one. “They’re not spicy!”, she reports, before going back for many repeats on all four: especially the puddle of mirin, natch. Then she tries dipping pieces of broccoli into each one in turn and tasting them that way. Having finished her broccoli, she finally hoovers up the chicken and rice. That, I figure, earns her a little dessert, so I get out a frozen peach pop for her and prop the iPad on the table.

As she ate dessert, we video chat with the Massachusetts Hankins, who proudly display their Halloween costumes and play peekaboo with an amused Piper, who keeps proclaiming, “I’ve got a peach pop!”  Then, off for teeth brushing. Piper’s developed some occasional and (thankfully) mild resistance to helping out the tooth brushing process, but after a request from me to help her get to book-reading more quickly, she leans back and says “Ahhh,” all the while signing the ASL word for “help.”

Three decently long books, as Piper fitsherself under my arm: “How to be a Baby,” “Lots of Dots,” and the last story in “Owl at Home”: “Owl and the Moon.” I turn out the light and do the bedtime ritual, which begins with “What a fun day!” and a recounting of everything (that I know) she’s done that day, with especial attention paid to friends and meals. We talk about what we’ll do tomorrow, and then I ask her for a few of her animal sound renditions. Tonight she happily neighs as a horse and chatters as a dolphin; she laughs knowingly but won’t perform when I ask her about crows, and she giggles when I ask about whales, because that’s my cue to make the lowest rumbles and the highest squeaks I can. Then it’s serious business: what does Mama say?  ”I love you.”  What does Abba say? “I love you.” What does Piper say?  ”Dawa.” And with that, I ASL-sign I-love-you-all-time, wish her a good night, and leave the room.

And then go back to her door 30 seconds later to tell her that no, she doesn’t need any orange medicine. (the kid ibuprofen we use apparently tastes really good, but it’s only for actual tooth issues.)

And then I’m back 30 seconds later with a sippy cup of water, at which point I say firmly that we’re done and good night: I’ll see you in the morning, kid, and don’t call unless there’s blood, flames or flashing lights.

It’s not that any of this evening is particularly remarkable. It is, in fact, that this is a thoroughly typical evening that makes me want to record it, lest it be lost in a generally pleasant blur. It’d be way too easy to only jot down the screaming fits or the Calgon-take-me-away moments… but man, these kinds of gently curved few hours together make me astoundingly satisfied to be a father.

CODA

I wonder whether we’ll have these quiet periods of awesome when the second one comes along?

Almost precisely halfway to a second / Due March 12, 2012 Gender: unknown

Context: I frequently ask Piper, “So, what’s your diaper situation?” To which she always invariably replies, “Good!” The verbal response is not the one I’m watching; if she sidles away while saying “Good!” than she’s trying to get out of smelling range, which indicates un petit falsehood as to her pants’ status. If she stays put, she’s most likely telling the truth.

However, this is not actually a diaper story. This morning, I took the bag out of our kitchen trashcan. While knotting the damn eco-friendly trash bag, I noticed a dead fly down in the bottom of the can, and figured I would swab out the whole thing when I came back from taking the bag out.  As I walked towards the back door, though, Piper walked over and peered down into the bottom of the can, and then quizzically looked at me. “What’s the bug situation?”

Late update: tonight we got asked about “the music situation,” during dinner.  So I think we officially have a catchphrase of the week.

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For months, now, Piper’s been getting physical therapy to make sure her gross motor skills keep relatively on track with the rest of her. (She could identify ducks and squirrels and dogs and trucks early on, knew the ASL signs for them, and damn near had her Masters degree in fruit-specific botany terms before she deigned to try walking on her own.)

For a long time she insisted on having an adult finger in both hands when trucking around on the playground, and it took a little while to get her down to walking with just one hand clutching ours. But in the last several weeks, her confidence and balance have come roaring to the fore, and as of a few days ago, she’d made the switch from “default to crawling” to “default to walking,” with all the congratulations and hubbub from her parents and grandparents that you might imagine.

So when she and I got to the park yesterday, I unbuckled her from her car seat, lifted her out, reflexively swept the seat for pretzels and cereal, set her down on the ground, and reached out my hand so we could start strolling.

Instead, she took off without me.

For the next hour, I mainly let her take the lead and set our pace. We stopped to snack and shoo squirrels and make beelines for other parents who might have more interesting food, but mostly she toddled and explored, reaching for my hand only when she needed to go up or down stairs, or take an off road trip into the bushes or back paths. She would occasionally (and very carefully) bend at the waist to pick up acorns or particularly sparkly rocks, usually managing to stay on her feet.

Coming down a set of stone steps, she demanded my hand at the top and immediately released it at the bottom, having seen a particularly alluring acorn, and I found myself, just for a second, momentarily and ridiculously … sad.

“But sad for what?”, I asked myself. Sad that the hand-holding rituals of a whopping two months were changing? Sad that this little person is discovering and exploring her independence? Or sad to find myself one eensy bit less necessary in this one aspect of her life? I knew rationally that all of these are cause for celebration, but surprised myself by still feeling a minute sliver of loss when she didn’t grab my hand again.

I think that’s what surprised me: that in 15 months, the biological imperative To Protect And Serve could have already been grooved so deep into my brain that Piper’s polite “thanks, but no thanks” could leave me for a moment wondering what I’m supposed to do with my hands when I go walking now.

(Do all parents meet their kids’ increasing independence with this same mix of 19 parts joy and 1 part mourning the moments just passed? More worryingly, does this put me at risk for mawkish wistfulness for the “simpler” days of infancy, when “all we had to worry about” was getting enough sleep to let us remember to move the oatmeal out from under our faces before we passed out on the dining room table? Lordy, I hope not.)

For better or worse, I felt necessary again about 20 seconds later, as Piper cussed me out for my stubborn insistence on walking between her and the curb, beyond which rolled the cars in the parking lot. “What a jerk you are, Abba,” she said (paraphrased) as she tried vainly to get around me and go give the Escalade a big hug. “Ah, yes,” I thought to myself, intercepting her. “Those familiar twin feelings of Being Needed and Being Yelled At: we’re not done with them quite yet.”

I scooped her up, buckled her into her car seat, handed her the raccoon trap filled with dried fruit and cereal and pretzel twigs, and we headed home.

I really, really need to nip my own reaction in the bud, here. It’s way too easy for me to get caught in the minutiae of a single meal, instead of backing off and remembering: we offer her a wide variety of (mostly) healthy foods, and she picks and chooses and doesn’t ever go hungry. And if she doesn’t eat food X today, she might tomorrow (and, gallingly, vice versa).

Control issues around food: never a good idea.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 11 months:

• Having a kid did not magically change me in one instant. This notion that parenthood flips a switch inside one’s head is bunk, as near as I can tell. We came home from the hospital and I was surprised by how little had changed. Dirty dishes: check. Meals to cook: check. Books to read, jobs to do, Kate to laugh with: check, check, check. There was just this small person who sleept a lot, in the next room. Was I a father then, or simply a caretaker? Dunno.



• I know I’m a father now, though. Eleven months of having this marvelous little person in my life has altered me as surely as wire shapes a bonsai tree. Slow, ever-changing circumstance and gradually altered habits have crept up on me.
• I watch her learn – to roll, to babble, to eat, to splash – and I am amazed.
• Cooking for the people I love is one of my greatest joys, and cooking for Piper one of the best of those joys. So many people seem to assume that babies should only eat bland, pureed, overcooked mush… and sure, Piper’s eaten that sort of thing. But watching her happily scarf down the curried lentils and currants I’d just made, and then go back for seconds? Awesome.



• Just in the last week, she’s crossed a threshold: to wit, the door from her room to the hall. I set her on the floor and turned my back while doing [SOMETHING DIAPER RELATED] and when I turned around, she had actually left the room to go out and investigate the fringe on the edge of the hallway rug. Friday she tossed herself into the frigid sprinkler at the park. Yesterday she chased the cat around the living room in slow-motion Lurch-O-Vision. This morning, she beat on the glass-fronted electronics cabinet with her remote control. She is going to break things, it’s clear: She is going to fall down, cut herself, bang her head. There Will Be Blood. And I will put band-aids on her and cheer her on as this heady cocktail of pride, caution, adventure and foolhardy exuberance hits us both.
• I am her Abba, this year, even if Piper has not yet mastered the word.

Admittedly, her movement technique has a bit of the “harbor-seal-galumphing-on-dry-land” about it, but I’m sure that’ll smooth out with time.

This bodes very well for her sense of humor, I suspect.

Kate’s chart of developmental milestones says that 90% of kids are rolling over by the time they’re six months old. By the time Piper hit seven and then eight months, Kate was suggesting we call Early Intervention to find out what the deal was. Remembering family stories about my incredibly late speech development and having become somewhat resistant to worrying about medical developments in the last year, I shrugged and said I figured she was simply developing at her own pace. “She’ll roll over eventually,” I said.

Eventually, however, and at our pediatrician’s recommendation, we did call Early Intervention. After two weeks of bureaucracy, they sent a physical therapist and a developmental specialist to evaluate Piper.

I had to go to work that day, but Kate called me once they’d left. “They say she’s definitely lagging, and she’s not showing any particular interest in rolling or moving around. They don’t know why. Her tone in her arms and legs is low, too. They’re going to refer her for physical therapy.”

And right there, my utter conviction that Piper was simply figuring things out at her own pace shattered on the floor like a dropped teacup.

I had not expected this, to say the least. Hearing an expert third party say that there’s something wrong with our kid, even something they think will be corrected with therapy, hit me far harder than hearing any diagnosis about *me* in the last year. Suddenly, I’m looking at Piper like her arms and legs might fall off at any moment. Kate and I are going over everything we’ve done as parents to see whether we’ve picked her up too much, put her toys too close, failed to drive the cats on carefully scheduled stampedes to induce her to pivot and watch them. (No, no, and probably, but whatever.)

Today we tried putting Piper’s toys further out of reach and gave her some of her daily time on her belly, and tried to hear her frustrated crying as the grunting people make in the gym when they’ve finally got the right weight on the bench press. Frustration should lead to motivation, and motivation to action, and action to borrowing the hovercar keys and posting on Telepathic-Facebook and rolling her eyes at how Dumb. We. Are. All of which I’ll accept, as long as this sick feeling that our happy kid has something wrong with her goes away.

The funny thing is, of course, is that Piper’s still doing exactly what she was doing on Monday morning, when I was still sure she was just doing her own thing. Still moving all her limbs, still getting better at picking the O’s and blueberries off her tray, still kicking me in the chest when she gets excited. She’s changing every day, and the things she’s doing are still changing. All that’s changed is a PT’s mild concern… but that’s enough to set me off.

To make me feel even more frustrated with my own anxiety, I recall that a seeming majority of our friends’ and family’s babies have had way more involved problems: hospitalizations and special shoes and brain imaging and early births and names that could very well get them stuffed into lockers, someday. Piper hasn’t had anything that severe, so why am I this worried? And what will I be like when she has a for-real crisis?