Shoes

Even the most delightful toddler occasionally likes to punish his parents for, you know, breathing. Today was our turn.

Dash came home from a day of hanging out with actual wild animals at school. Seriously, they brought in a monkey and, like, a goat or something. I'm not quite sure. Anyway, it was awesomely amazing and the child was thrilled and full of laughter and dancing and actual rainbows shot out of his actual ass on the way home. Josh couldn't wait to get this baby home to tickle him and dance around to They Might Be Giants and shoot whipped cream into his maw straight from the can.

Wasn't to be.

The child wasn't all the way in the door when he melted the fuck down. Neither one of us has even a guess as to what happened or why. He just stumbled into the entry, hurled himself onto the floor and proceeded to imitate a cartoon of a baby throwing a tantrum. For two hours. Straight. Without even a break for dinner. There was even screaming in between long pulls on his milk. For two hours, you understand.

In all of the uproar I'd forgotten to show Josh the spoils of my most recent trip to a discount department store near my office (I take finding bargains incredibly seriously). Not anything too thrilling. Just a shirt for Josh, some baskets and a sweet little frame for me, and two new pairs of shoes for the baby.

Well. I now have my actual first proof that Dash is my child, too, and not just some scraping of Josh's cheek forced to divide and transferred into my naive uterus. When the baby saw his Two! New! Pairs! Of! Shoes! (One! With! Velcro!) all of our previously offensive existing was promptly forgotten. All that was left was a celebration of life and shoes (a different one on each foot) all the rest of the night through.

As it should be.

What we Saw at the Zoo

Elephant

Bald Eagle

Penguins

Otters

Flamingos

Monkey

Does

It's a little sorry, I know, to create entire blog posts of little anecdotes about "oh, Dash did the cutest thing ever the other day," but it can't be helped. As I mentioned in my previous post, my memory for his doings is almost nothing, so if I don't write this down I'm terrified it'll be gone forever.

Dash has many favorite books. He lurves him some reading (and by reading I mean pulling all of the movable parts off of the flap-py and pop-py books I insist on buying him even though I know he will destroy them immediately.) His favorite anything is Elmo. This is odd because he has literally never seen an episode of Sesame Street, but he has a close personal relationship with the creature. It must be a chip they implant at the hospital. There are two "look and find" Elmo books in our house (like Where's Waldo for dummies. or, you know, babies) and he can spot Elmo in fractions of a second. He can discern him from every other primary-colored Muppet without even really looking: "Dash, can you show Mama Elm...?" "BAM!" Index finger on the red puppet before I can get the word out. Done.

Anyway, this wasn't really supposed to be about Elmo. He also loves this book:

Which is fairly shocking to me. It was kinda pretentious and deluded of me to buy him a book that illustrates the ABCs with works of art from the permanent collection at the Met. But, huh, he likes it. OK, so you get the premise. A is for apple and there are paintings, figural and abstract, of apples to illustrate. Dash sees the apple, says "apple," and we all think he's a genius.

However, there is this page:


When he gets to "D" there is no talking. There is only a shimmy. I'm not fucking kidding. I know you don't believe me, but I swear to god it's the truth. The boy sees pictures of people dancing and he starts to dance.

I know that you have died already, but if I could just revive you for another moment.

There is also this page:


What do you think he does when he happens upon this page? Go on, guess. No, you'll never guess because it's just too much. But it's true: the child, without a sound from him or me, bends over the page and gives it a kiss.

Becoming

I am finally starting to get why people have more than one kid. I mean, yes, all the usual reasons, but also: it all goes by so fast. I can measure how he has grown at the end of every single day: the new words he has learned, pronunciations mastered, the behaviors outgrown and the new ones acquired. Seriously, in the course of a day.

Dash is a week shy of 18 months and Josh & I are already so lonesome for mannerisms he has abandoned. Literally, the baby will start a new way of walking (for example: swinging both arms in unison in order, we assume, to propel him just a wee bit faster toward his goal) and as soon as Josh gets a workable impersonation going, whoosh, it's gone. On to the next thing. Thank god Josh has a better memory for all of the darling things that came and went in the blink of an eye, because if it were up to me to recall it all may as well never happened.

Last night I was searching around in his dresser looking for pjs that don't smell like mold (everything in his dresser has suddenly started to smell like mold. I'm getting a little worried) and I found one of the rompers he lived in last summer. He was just 6 months old and spent all day every day in some variation of this:


Coming across that romper took my breath away, a little like a punch in the stomach. I just can't believe that he has been around long enough to have made progress. To have outgrown something. It really does make one nearly insane enough with grief for those moments of babyhood you'll never get back to just start again from scratch.