raul andres: I am Pirate Raul. This is my treasure chest. We will bury it.

me: What's in that treasure chest?

Pirate Raul: GOLD! SILVER!

me: anything else?

Pirate Raul: and... and...bones! and coins! and... peg legs!

me: and?

Pirate Raul: rocks and shells and... chocolate!

me: and?

Pirate Raul: and... and... Cucumbers! Lots and lots of cucumbers!

Trees talk to each other at night.

All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.

Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.

Tiny bears live in drain pipes.

If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.

The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

I will always be there.

One of the games I play with my 3 year old is to present him with images of family members when they were younger to see if he recognizes them. He recognizes his mother back into her childhood, his grandfather he sees only with a beard, and me he has no problem identifying after about the age of 16. Today I presented him with this image, a picture I found of myself circa 1992, taken while out backpacking.

I had a pretty full beard, was very skinny and to my eyes look barely unrecognizable, but my son was almost annoyed when I asked who was in the picture. "It's you daddy. You have a big beard, blue shirt, and a hat with a P. You are outside."

"Are you sure it's me" I asked.

"Yeah. Daddy it's you." Then he studied the picture a bit more, "But where am I?" he asked.

Years from now I look forward to torturing my kids with a collection of 'scared of Santa' pictures. This one is pretty good, but 2005's is my favorite.

On Thursday a day shy of his 3rd birthday, my son and I turned a corner onto Prince street when we encountered a man who had just been hit by a car. His face was badly bloodied and his leg was twisted at a grotesque angle. We arrived just as he slumped over to the ground. The man driving of the car was also in distress, also bleeding. He was sitting in the driver's seat trying to adjust his broken glasses, stunned, and surrounded by smoke, presumably from the airbag. The car had jumped the curb and was pressed into a lamp pole. Although we arrived just seconds after the accident people on the street had already sprung into action. Two passersby were comforting the man on the ground. Another man sacrificed an overcoat to keep him warm. A husband and wife team in matching full length fur coats were attending to the driver. My son was still, outwardly impassive. Although my instinct had been to hurry him down the street he was transfixed. Hearing the ambulance siren he said, "The ambulance will take the man to the hospital and give him a big band aid and then he'll be better."
"Yes," I said, "We should go so the ambulance men can do their work."
"Ok," he said.
A few minutes later we were at a restaurant. "I want french fries and cauliflower", he announced and then went on to talk about robots, his mom, a girl he likes in school, his little brother, his upcoming birthday party, robots again, and trains.

In his second year of his life, our son's world has opened up to include all the things he reads in books. He has a sense that the world is round. He knows we live in Brooklyn and that winter follows fall. When it we got a dusting of snow the other day he first wanted to taste it, then build a snowman, then build an igloo. He calls his mom "my cutie pie" and loves to sing Amazing Grace and Clementine. And yet for all that knows and all that he can do at 3, there are still many traces lingering babydom. His parents are still his touchstones and too much time apart from us leave him somewhat undone. A blank face is often presented to strangers, a mask for a vague distrust. He falls asleep alone, but ends up in our bed every night. The upset over an apparently small thing can easily turn into tears.

Raul Andres' world has been turned upside down several times this year, most dramatically by the addition of a brother, later by the loss of a house.

I knew he would be a good big brother when he began asking me to include Gabriel in his bedtime stories just a few days after Gabriel was born. "One day a little boy, Raul Andres, went out for a walk..." I would start.
"And you too?"
"Me too."
"And mommy?"
"And mommy."
"And Gabriel?"
"And Gabriel.... So Raul Andres, mommy, daddy, and Gabriel all went out on a walk..."

The old house, he still misses. We moved four blocks away so it's still painfully close for him. Last week we walked by the old place on the way home from school.
"This was our house," he declared, "we lived here for a long time. Can we go inside."
"No," I replied. "Someone else lives there now."
"I'm sad," he said.
"Me too," I said.
"Can we sit down?" he asked pointing to the stoop.
We had spent countless hours on the stoop during his first two years. Sitting there and watching people pass by was one of his favorite things to do."
"Of course. Let's sit."
We sat for a while in silence and then continued walking home. "I miss that house too much," he declared.

And so it was for much of the year—a wonderful economy in his words.

His terrible twos were miraculously short. We can count the number of limp-noodle-fall-on-the-ground-sobbing incidents on one hand. And that period seems to be long over.

Unlike a 2 year old whose his life is all about the here and now, the 3 year old anticipates events big and small Halloween, Christmas, or maybe just the next time we sit outside and eat peppermint. And after experiencing things he thinks about them. "Last Halloween I was a wolf, next Halloween I want to be a robot and a fireman."

The 3 year old is contemplative. Last night, or 'last night ago' as he would say, my son brought up the man who had been hit by the car. "Do you think that man will be ok?" he asked.
"I think so." I replied.
"We must be careful when we cross the street," he declared.
"Yes." I said, "We must be careful when we cross the street."
"Today is my birthday, tomorrow is my birthday party, just like in my book."
"Yes," I answered."
"Then I will be 3?"
"Yes," I said."
"And then 4?"
"And then 4," I replied.
"Someday..."

related: On Turning Two

Almost every night when everyone is asleep, I'll rearrange my son's train tracks. We have wooden tracks, the kind I wish I had when I was a kid. (The secret to buying kids trains is to not worry so much about the trains themselves, but get a good variety of tracks). I sit on the floor in the semi-darkness and try to come up with an interesting design because I know in a few hours my son will wander in dragging me by the hand and the first thing he'll do is study the new tracks before sitting down and playing trains for a while. He's never asked why the tracks are always different, it's just how things are in his world. It's little my way of telling the kid I love him. Sometimes, like this morning, I'll fall asleep on the couch while he's there playing and when I wake up I'll be covered in carefully placed cars and trains covering me from head to toe. I figure that's his way of saying he loves me back.

This entry might be subtitled 'fun with coverflow':

He wakes up, takes a walk with dad, sees 2 rabbits, 1 beaver, 2 deer, 4 ducks, and several fish...asks if we are in a zoo.

He marvels at the lack of cars on the roads. Creates a song called, "'No car street. No car day."

He stands and ponders the expanse of grass. For the New York City kid a few hundred feet of unpeopled grass is unheard of. City two year olds are constantly being told not to run, not to go too far, not to touch, to look both ways, et-cetera. Two year olds are of course programmed to run, so an endless swath of grass looks like pure freedom. He pauses as the exhilaration builds, laughs and takes off at high speed for the top of the hill. Unlike older kids, the two year old does not modulate his speed. He runs as fast as he can as far as he can. Reaching the top of the hill and seeing nothing but more grass on the other side he runs down. Soon he falls and rolls but falling on grass doesn't hurt. This is novel. In the city when you fall it stings. Not so here. Giggling uncontrollably he rolls around some more, springs up and runs up another hill.

He sees a sky full of stars for the first time in his life and gets very quiet. After a while he asks, "Daddy, stars take home?"

Why is it that we dads, feel compelled to make home movies, even with crappy little digital cameras?

by Raul Andres, 2 years 5 months

1. "Lobsters"
2. "Shower not tub!"
3. "Under big rocks, under."
4. "Scary tree, scary scary tree"*
5. "Big big lobsters"

*The scary tree:

"The scary tree" from Choo Choo by Virgina Lee Burton

In literature the witching hour happens around midnight, but for the infants my wife and I produce, it's 6PM. At that hour Gabriel like his brother before him, regardless of being well fed, held by someone who loves him, and otherwise comfortable, begins to cry. But not just any crying, it's desperate crying, as if all sadness in the world were wrapped up in that little 12 pound bundle. He's inconsolable for about 90 minutes. Then as suddenly as it starts, it ends. The kid sleeps. Our first son outgrew this in a few months and we trust the second will follow. Of course we try all the standard calming techniques, but they have limited effect. [The only things that take a bit of the edge off are a mechanical swing, the one horrible baby device that passed through our 'no plastic baby crap' filter, and a pacifier. We are new to pacifiers (Raul Andres spit them out as if we had put garbage in his mouth), and Jenn doesn't like them either ("Yikes, makes him look like a little Hannibal Lector."), but whatever works, right? ]

Jenn blames the daily crying session on the baby's new and undeveloped digestive system, but my grandmother would have had another explanation were she alive. For her an inconsolable baby was obviously the work of someone who had given the child "mal ojo" (the evil eye). "It happened to you once," she would always tell me with a laugh.

Then she would explain that once she had forgotten to cover my face when we went out and the neighborhood fortune teller peeked and hated my blue gringo eyes. "You started to cry right there," my grandmother would recount, "and you cried through the night and into the next day and we couldn't do anything to help you."

The next day she ran into the fortune teller who asked, "that baby cried all night didn't he?" My grandmother said yes and getting angry told the woman that neither she nor the baby had done the woman wrong and demanded a cure. The woman (my grandmother always called her una brujita feisima) led my grandmother to her garden and pulled 3 fresh brown eggs from a chicken coop. "Rub these gently over the baby's head when the moon is out. Then break the egg carefully. If the yolk is whole and looks like an eye, the spell will be broken. Throw the eggs out into the dirt. If the yolk will not stay together, you might be in for a lifetime of worry." While the eggs were rubbed on my head I am told I screamed bloody murder. Immediately afterwards the eggs were dropped in water, and eye was formed on the first try. "You stopped crying instantly" and if my grandmother is to be believed, "the crying never returned."

Maybe we need to break out some eggs.

Sometimes when I am very tired as I was today, I will lie on my belly, put my arm under my head, bump up against a pillow, cross my feet at the ankles, and fall instantly, blissfully, asleep. I've been doing this all my life although I've never really thought about it until today. It's one of my most primal behaviors. My wife's sister Becky sleeps while holding onto the corners of pillowcases, eventually wearing them threadbare. An electrician in LA, a guy named Joe who spoke in whispers, claimed no matter where he slept he would wake with his head facing north. This trait while comforting was something of an embarrassment, "I'm a human compass," he admitted sheepishly, "my wife hates it, especially on trips. My mother said I did it in the crib." All of us have some primal behaviors we retreat to, and sleep being one of the most basic and misunderstood needs of all things with brains, happens to be one place where these behaviors reveal themselves easily.

During my wife's first pregnancy we spent a great deal of the time speculating on our future (and at that point somewhat theoretical) child. We discussed smarts and looks and so on and so on. I don't think we discussed personality once. He was born and from the beginning his personality clear... obvious and often unexpected. Immediately after his birth we practiced parenting techniques based on our own lives and various books, but until we started modifying them through the filter of his personality many approaches failed miserably. Now personality takes priority over dogma (with much more success). It is almost the one thing around which most of our understanding of him is based. The idea that your personality is well formed at birth is a weird concept because most of us like to think we arrived at our present state through a series of formative events. But more and more I tend to believe those formative events influence us only within a range determined by our particular personalities. Of course family perceptions have a multiplying effect. If we see a child and consider him to be kind, or selfish, or sensitive, or sad or whatever we will tend to treat him accordingly, so perhaps over time personalities become more hard coded than they would have naturally.

Even though our second son has been with us for only 7 days, we are developing theories about what kind of person he might become. Ridiculous as it might seem for a little piglet-like human being who suckles, sleeps, and poops, it seems so obvious after 2 years of experience with our first child that understanding his personality is one of our most important jobs as parents.

Ask someone you have known your entire life to tell you three stories about your early childhood. I'll bet they'll tell you stories that reveal their understanding of your most raw personality, the unvarnished you, and like primal ways of finding comfort in sleep, these traits are inescapable, revealed when we are most unguarded. They are the filters through which we see the world and sometimes the instincts we work hardest to supress. Noble or ignoble, there might be some comfort in knowing that through all our iterations as human beings there are some things about us that never change.

semi-related: Wikipedia on personality psychology, 9 traits of infant personality, Clotaire Rapaille on reducing culture to primal codes (and using those codes for base, but nevertheless ingenious, marketing campaigns)

Close readers of this blog will notice that I made a post about my wife being in labor at 6:24PM on Thursday and that the baby was born a little over 2 hours later. This is the story of those 2 hours:

Earlier that Thursday afternoon Jenn had been in a light pre-labor, "I think I’m having contractions" she had announced nonchalantly. They aren’t that bad." Then she went about her day and we guessed we might have to go to the hospital in the morning. I was writing that blog post when I was called into the laundry room, so I finished up and hit send. Downstairs my wife was crouched down on the floor, "We have to go now," she announced. I was asking a follow-up question when she put up her hand to stop me and started making a low non-human noise I recognized from the birth of our first son. It was a noise that had preceded the actual birth by only an hour or so just before she went into transition. It was time to GO.

I sprinted down the street to the garage only to find it backed up. "Calm down" I kept telling myself... "Everything will be fine." A few minutes later driving up my own street, I was almost sideswiped by a truck running a very red light. "Inauspicious." It took a full 4 minutes to get Jenn from the door of the house to the door of the car. The contractions would release, she would walk a few steps, and then they would come again. At this point the contractions were coming about every 2 minutes. Not ideal, but not critical yet.. I briefly considered running over to the emergency room of a nearby hospital instead of our assigned birthing center, but the contractions seemed steady so I headed across the Brooklyn Bridge and onto FDR for the drive uptown. A little geography for non New Yorkers: We live in Brooklyn which is across the river from Manhattan. Our birthing center is at St. Lukes Roosevelt on 10th Avenue and 58th Street on the west side..... It’s an 8.4 mile drive but traffic is unavoidable. I was counting on a 30 minute ride. The FDR is an aging highway up the eastern edge of Manhattan. It has no shoulders. Traffic is heavy, and exits are few. Once you hit the FDR, you’re committed. Of course just as we hit the FDR Jenn’s contractions started coming faster... about every 45 seconds. Now if you’ve never been in a Mini Cooper on the FDR with a woman in full labor, screaming bloody murder with each contraction, whimpering and breathing heavily with each release, and holding your arm so tight it’s bruising, well... um...I don’t recommend it. I was trying to focus on driving, speaking in platitudes, giving Jenn updates on our location, and quite frankly, saying a few silent prayers. But platitudes were not what my wife wanted. "JUST SHUT UP!" she bellowed. At about 22nd street traffic stopped dead. We were inching forward. Jenn was banging the windows with each contraction. I realized we could become one of those stories on the evening news. Woman Gives Birth on FDR. I didn’t want to be on the news. I thought about the opening scene in Wings of Desire where the angels float over a highway peeking in on the small self-contained worlds contained in each vehicle... The Punjabi cab driver two lanes over might be thinking of his wife's curry. I noticed a guy talking to his girlfriend who was staring out the window at the city beyond—what was she thinking, and what about the trucker smoking and singing to himself... they were all unaware... I willed them to move. Didn't they realize what was going on? Just as I was losing hope traffic began to move. I decided as long as Jenn was saying, "I can’t do this. I can’t do this" we were fine, but the minute she said, "We’re not going to make", I was going to veer off and find a closer hospital. If she mentioned pushing it would be time to stop the car. I make the mistake of asking if she wanted music. "MUSIC?!!" she responded. Ok my bad. Finally exiting the FDR we made it to 57th street which is littered with red lights (all unbearably long), was clogged with traffic, and was busy with pedestrians... At each stoplight crowds of people hearing the long howls and stop dead in their tracks. At 57th and 5th we drew a crowd. Jenn was completely obvious, she was going internal. One guy gave us a thumbs up. A woman wearing a fur coat blew a kiss. An old lady crossed herself. One guy shouted "She's having a baby!"

A few eternal minutes later we finally screeched into the hospital driveway we were almost rear ended by another car. It was our midwife whose scramble had been just as frantic as ours. She took one look at my wife and said, "We might have to deliver in the lobby."

We did not deliver in the lobby. After much heaving and ho-ing we manuvered Jenn into a wheelchair and rushed her up to the birthing center. Minutes later she was in a large tub of warm water which sent her straight into transition. A few minutes later the midwife, myself, and a labor nurse were all on the bed holding onto legs and arms as she pushed the baby out in what seemed like record time. The midwife caught the baby and put in on jenn’s breast complete with cord. Jenn was sobbing. I was drenched in sweat and viscera... but the moment was oddly quiet almost silent. We were there with this brand new kid, still steaming from the womb. He was blinking and alert, turning toward his mother whenever she spoke. The shadow of death which hangs over all births had passed, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. It was at this point that I realized in the rush I had left my camera bag in the car—a final ironic twist. The moment would be undocumented. I'll just have to put my brain on record," I thought.

This birth was completely unlike the birth of our first son who was delivered in the same hospital, but in a standard hospital labor & delivery room. In that birth, mother and child were both connected to a tangle of monitors and tubes. Doctors and nurses were running in and out of the room, and right after birth the baby was taken away to a nursery for a battery of hospital tests. It was noisy and chaotic and anything but private. At the birth center it was just the four of us (well eventually 5). There were no beeping monitors or needles or anything else. Minimal tests were done and mother and baby were both alert and sharp afterwards. Physically the natural birth took less of a toll even though it was exponentially more intense. Jenn said the hardest thing was the total submission to pain without modulation. She and another fresh-from-labor mom were comparing notes this morning... "There are no words," said my wife. "There are no words," echoed the woman. Later when we discussed things, Jenn said couldn’t outright recommend one type of birth over the other. The lack of relief in this birth was terrifying... She missed the epidural induced pause of the last one. And all those monitors and tubes and needles that had bothered me so much about about the first birth... she had never noticed them, so they weren’t really a factor with her. Of course in this particular birth we wouldn't have had a choice anyway. The wouldn't have been time for an epidural. She did appreciate that I was allowed to stay overnight in the birthcenter, and that the room was our own. No roommates, no nurses interrupting us every few minutes hours. We even had a decent view down 10th Avenue. It was like being in a hotel room.

Late in the evening, lying on the bed with newborn Gabriel between us, we heard another woman in heavy labor—the familiar deep moans, curses and cries penetrating the walls. During lulls we heard her husband saying things, like "just relax, it will be ok. Breath. Try to relax honey" and it sounded so... so... impotent and ridiculous... he sounded like he wasn't even convincing himself... "he should just shut up" Jenn said. "True true," I agreed. We both laughed.

Before your first child is born, if you are like most of us, you tell yourself lies.

You say, "We won’t change our lives."
You say, "We’ll won’t be like those other parents."
You say, "We won’t be like our parents."

But of course your lives change. Of course you’re like those other parents, obsessing over every burp and gurgle. And maybe not initially, but after a bit, you find yourself doing and saying things that remind you of your own parents. That much is inevitable. It happens to everybody.

When preparing for the first you have this illusion that you can make things perfect, or almost perfect. "If I just plan everything in advance," you think... So you buy too much gear, you paint and prep and read too many baby books. You develop plans to avoid the sleep deprivation everyone talks about.

And then the kid arrives and those first few weeks almost kill you because while your kid is booting up all his systems nothing goes according to plan. Nothing happens the way it’s "supposed to". There is always some crisis you can’t solve. There are never enough hands around to help and of course, you never get enough sleep. Your life changes, fundamentally and irrevocably.

And then, if you are like many of us, after about eighteen months or so you start having so much fun, you forget those first hard months and go for a second. During the second pregnancy you are so busy with the first child so you don’t think about the pregnancy much at all. You don’t plan or read books, it just kind of progresses on it’s own until the last few weeks when you realize "holy cow we’re having a another whole kid" and fear begins to creep over you as you remember those first hard weeks. "We’re not ready yet, we need more time. How did 9 months pass?" you ask yourself. You worry about how the first child will accept the second. You worry that you won’t have enough time for the second, and you worry about how life will change again just as you were starting to figure things out and become yourselves again. But there a line of thought that provides deep comfort at what lies ahead, "Things will not be perfect. We’ll fail just as we did before. It’s going to be hard. We’re not going to sleep. Nothing will go as planned. But everything will be ok. Just as we did the first time we’ll ride things out. Make things up. Break a few rules, and it will all be just fine. We know it will."
. . . . .
p.s. This evening Jenn turned to me and said, 'We can't have this baby yet, we still have too much to do.'
'Like what', I asked.
'We don't have enough onesies.'
'You aren't going to have the baby because we're low on onesies?'
'What's he going to wear?'

also:

apropos of nothing she turned to me and said:
"When I'm in labor nobody is allowed to say to me, I'm opening like a flower."
"Did anyone say that last time?"
"No. But If I hear it I'm going to hit someone."

Last week I noticed my two year old son staring out the window with his face pressed against the glass. I came over and he pointed out to the curb. "Tree," he said.

I had worried about this. The night before we had undecorated the Christmas tree while he was sleeping. Now it was 6:30 in the morning and it was the first thing he noticed.

He had been pretty excited about the tree. The night we put it up he kept disappearing and reappearing from the living room as we arranged the lights. We thought he wasn't interested and was getting cars or something. He was actually hauling his pillows and blankets into the room so he could go to sleep in view of the tree. For the month it was up, turning on the Christmas lights was the first order of the day.

And now the tree was out on the street with the garbage. He insisted on an inspection, so we went outside. There it was on the curb wet from rain and with a single ornament dangling from it's lower branch. He immediately ran over and began a valiant attempt to drag the 7 foot tree back to the house. He's less than 3 feet tall. I explained the tree had spent a long time with us making us happy but now it was time for it to go away to be with the other trees. I pointed out the many trees scattered on the curb up and down the block. He paused, considered the explanation, and solemnly waved goodbye to the tree. We removed the ornament. Then, grabbing my hand he led me down the street and with real gravitas said goodbye to each and every tree.

Other than my own dim memories I knew nothing of the world of toddlers until I had one of my own, but I've come to believe that our early years are the ones in which we are the truest versions of ourselves. In those years we are without the accumulated layers of knowledge, the cruft of life, that gives our world boundaries. The truth was I was sad too and at that moment it felt unfair we couldn't keep trees in the house all year long. I almost believed my own white lie about the trees returning to the forest. Comforting. And of course that's how it starts, one day you realize the trees are just going to mulched and sent to the dump and you wonder why your father lied to you. You don't realize until much later that this is the lie he had heard from his father.

Afterwards we returned home and my son searched through the house until he found his Christmas book featuring a tree. Again, he said "bye bye," and then, satisfied, he threw the book aside and bounded upstairs ready for the next thing.

I was driving down Flushing Avenue near the Brooklyn Navy Yard tonight when I passed a friend biking down the other side of the street. If you don't know it, the Navy Yard is sort of a semi-abandoned walled off industrial area. It features ruined mansions, the parking lot where police tow cars with too many delinquent tickets, and some sort of sewage treatment plant. Anyway, at night whole area is pretty deserted so I slowed down and shouted over to my friend as he pedaled along at a furious pace. I yelled hello and drove off but he soon caught up to me at a red light. Through the open window I asked after his wife who is pregnant and he said he thought she might give birth tonight or tomorrow... He said he looked at her this morning and was just staggered. We forget what those last days of pregnancy look like. She's due. Overdue probably. He was rushing home and after that brief exchange he zoomed off at full speed not bothering to stop for the lights...

It's a very specific feeling— knowing your wife is on the cusp of giving birth. I used to use the analogy of being in an airport, heading off for a big adventure, but being on hold, waiting for a flight that you know will come, but that keeps being rescheduled or sometimes I would use the analogy of being a kid waiting for Christmas... But these descriptions are thin soup compared to the complexity of the actual emotions. And for the woman the physicality of pregnancy and birth adds dense layers of hard to define feelings to the whole thing. My wife Jenn isn't due until the end of February but already tiny hands, feet, and elbows push out from her belly. That supreme intimacy with another human being can be profound and overwhelming all at once. She's ready to have the baby tomorrow. That's the thing with the second baby. Jenn is ready. Enough already she says.

We dads have it easy. We worry a little. We try to keep things under control. But mainly we ride our bikes in the dark as fast as we can hoping for the best.

related: a post titled circling from before our son was born (note: at that time we thought we were having a girl). It would be another week before he was actually born.

When my childless friends ask what it's like to be parent, I often say that it's like being in a boat lost in fog, but then you figure some tiny thing and the fog clears to reveal a full moon over a calm sea.

Tonight was one of those nights.

Our son fell asleep normally, but kept waking up and crying for his mom. After the 3rd or 4th trip downstairs for my very pregnant, very tired wife, I volunteered to take a shift. The minute our son saw me instead of his mom, he started crying inconsolably.

Now if you've never seen a 2 year old cry, especially a kid like ours who is pure sugar, it's like watching all the sadness in the world poured into this little pup of a human being. There is no anger, no reproach, just pure unfiltered sorrow. So I try to hold him and he just turns away, giant tears streaming down his cheeks. "No daddy. Noooo..."

There is one school of parenting that says, offering comfort in these situations is exactly the wrong thing to do, that you need to steel yourself and be hard and that by going cold turkey the child will learn to sleep by himself. We tried that once or twice and our son sobbed so hard he started throwing up. He was a headbanger as an infant until we brought him to our bed. The headbanging stopped immediately. The kid is just a people person.

Anyway he was sobbing, crying for his mom, and I told him if he felt sad to hold my hand. His hand reached out, grabbed my finger and squeezed it hard. I asked him if he felt better, and he nodded. He turned to me and through a stream of alligator tears said, "Up. Up. Momma. Momma." I told him his mother needed to rest and eat dinner which led to more gulping heaving sobs. He turned away again. He was trying to keep it together, but not doing a very good job of it, with cycles of crying and wails. This went on for a long time and I was about to break down and call for Jenn. Then I whispered, "Hey, I'll hold you until your mom comes to bed, however long it takes. You can hold me too." He turned to me, gave me the tightest hug a kid his size can give, rested his forehead against mine, and held my face with both his hands. The tears stopped, he gave me a kiss, closed his eyes, and fell into deep slumber. That was all there was too it. He didn't want to be alone tonight. And who does really?

There is a moment during great concerts after last note has played out, but before the applause starts, of lingering clarity. The music trails in your head, the musician waits expectantly for the audience reaction, the crowd recoils silently with palpable tension. The quiet is delicious and I always want it to go on forever. But then, usually too soon, people leap to their feet spontaneously, applauding and cheering. The artist relaxes, smiles and the moment has passed.

That in-between moment is the best way I know to describe the experience of seeing of seeing my son for the first time. After the drama of being born he was lying in an incubator squalling under the attention of a small battery of nurses and doctors. They parted allowing me in and there was a sudden quiet. My son's eyes opened for the first time and we looked at each other. He held my finger. Everything fell away. Lingering clarity... and then of course it was time to bring him to his mother who worked so hard to get him into this world and things got noisy again.

With a first child you spend nine months speculating. What will he look like? Will he have a sense of humor? Will he hate eggs like I do? Will he have my toes or yours? But when the child is actually born, sitting there blinking, still steaming from the womb, holding your finger with his entire hand, you realize, you don't know anything, you have no idea what to do, and the only thought in your head is, "What have we done?"

Fast forward two years to this morning. My son is hiding under a blanket. When I peek underneath he says in his scariest voice, "Boo" and pulls down a corner. From my perspective I see a blanket covered mound shaking with giggles. He refers to watermelon as "mmmmmmmmmm" as in "yummmmmmmmm". He is moved by music of all kinds, finding it impossible not to sway his entire body from side to side when hears something he digs. He insists we join in his rapture so if you see the Gutierrez family at an Indian restaurant and they are playing Bollywood tunes (he loves Hindi music), you will see all of us chair dancing in unison and a huge smile on my son's face. He loves the moon and wants me to grab it for him. None of this would I have imagined.

Of course it hasn't all been fun. Sleep has never been our son's strong suit... All the clichés about not knowing vulnerability until you have a kid are true... wait until your 3 month old has a raging fever, or you watch your 6 month old topple from a chair, or witness a 4 year old sucker punch your kid in the playground. Each incident stops your heart for a second, but while these things hurt our parental minds, the kids are, for the most part, oblivious. They're hard to break. It is a necessary trait of the very young, to shake things off and to keep moving forward without looking back.

Time has a different meaning for a 2 year old. He can spend an afternoon chasing ants and have it pass in a second, but 5 minutes in a car seat can stretch out to eternity. For us parents days flicker by with blinding speed. We look at pictures from 3 months ago and say to each other, "My god he was such a baby."

Life is full of so many firsts. First smile. First steps. First time seeing the ocean. First ice cream. First stars. First time wearing waders in the rain. First time playing in a pile of leaves. First scar. Maybe first memories.

And for this particular two year old life has been full of people who love him, and he expresses love in return with an almost heartbreaking openness. If only things could always be this sweet...

related: birth, one year

When you walk to the corner deli having conversations with neighbors along the way completely forgetting you have a zebra stickers on your forehead.

Today, like so many days with a spent with a young child, sort of drifted away. We played cars. We ran in the park. We went to a birthday party. We read books. He saw the moon for the first time though (not seeing the moon until you are almost 2 is a hazard for the early to bed). That was something. He was impressed. I was too.

related: mira la luna

Our contemplative skunk cheered up once the candy started flowing but of course we have no pictures of that...

Say no, not because you mean it, but because it's funny.
Repeat: Noooo. Noohhhhh. No.
Be delighted by small things.
Spontaneously kiss the ones you love.
Refuse to look at those who disappoint.
Be wary of the wind.

Hide. Be found. Hide again.
Walk bottomless throughout the house.
Practice closing your eyes remembering to squeeze them tight.
Giggle until you roll over.
Read books about alligators or cars or better, alligators AND cars.
Live for today.
Run. Whenever possible, run.

....is a boy if sonograms are to be believed. The lady technician didn't announce the news but rather typed it on the monitor over a shadowy picture of a gently rolling fetus dropping the letters one by one, "i t ' s a . . .", and then a dramatic pause. I looked up and noticed the technician studying my wife's face before typing the next letter, perhaps she was looking for tale-tell signs of joy, or disappointment or even grief knowing our reality would turn on it's axis at that moment. For a few seconds she held the secret of our future life in limbo. A lifetime with 2 boys is so different from that with a boy and a girl. I noticed my wife literally holding her breath. The technician takes 15 sonograms a day so this was a practiced flourish. She half-smiled, typed a "b", and my wife exhaled. Jenn had sort of been hoping for a girl. Her reaction was not disappointment exactly but was not what she had imagined. Perhaps our last experience of being told we were having a girl, expecting a girl, and then having a boy, made her feel we were owed a girl. That girl lived in our imagination for so many months she become real to us. But just as our reality shifted the moment Raul Andres was born when our shocked doctor exclaimed, "it's a...boy? a very big boy," by the time the technician had finished typing "oy!!!" those exclamation points were justified... as for the girl... well, perhaps she will be #3.

Video here.

My son doesn't talk in his sleep, he makes siren sounds.They always startle me awake-the imitation is getting good. Sirens are his shorthand for ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks. My wife rarely sleep-talks but through the baby monitor I swear I just heard her sigh and say, "No joy for the scullery maid."

Related: Dark Waters, River of Sleep

After 22 months, finally a haircut. He wasn't happy about it at first, but a gummy bear made things better. Afterwards.

Most mornings these days I am woken up by son's plaintive plea "Cars! Cars. Cars. Cars!" I seek out the two cars from the night before (he falls asleep holding them) and put one in each hand. He pees on his kid potty leaning over to roll the cars on the floor and when he's finished we head upstairs. I pour some milk as he seeks out his favorite vehicles. Today's favorite a green truck. We sit on the rug together and push cars around the floor. He announces each one. "Blue car. Digger. Red truck!" Police cars, ambulances and fire trucks are introduced with a serious look and a siren sound. Eventually he will throw himself on his belly car in each hand pushing them under chairs, over pillows, and around over his own arm totally engrossed. This is my cue to check email, write a blog post, and catch up on the news on my computer. He will gravitate to me ending up under my desk moving cars and trucks round and round my feet waiting for the moment when I'll be done so we can take a walk around the block looking at for more cars.

A few notes about sonograms for those of you who have never seen one live.

1. Normal sonograms are cross sections (imagine a slice of an apple) so you are looking at the outline... it's all fairly murky when you view them live until you see the beating heart. Usually the doctor will also include an audio monitor so you can hear the heartbeat. Seeing this is all fairly interesting in a cerebral sort of way until you see a turn of the head or the appearance of a hand. Then it gets dramatic, none of this can be captured by a still image. This sonogram was taken fairly early on so there isn't much definition. The baby is the size of a large avocado. Later on the outline of the features becomes much clearer.

2. Most hospitals don't let you take pictures (i did anyway).

3. The doctors give you little printouts... which are invariably illegible smudges. These printouts are on low quality thermal paper which fades, so scan them if you want to preserve the image...

4. There are now 3D sonograms, but the images they produce are a little creepy.

Hey, from Portugal.

Things are good. Here's why:

I go nuts over a good castle and Obidos has a great castle. It looks exactly like the ones I drew as a kid (I preferred towers to battlements).

And.

The Portuguese don't look at you like you're crazy if you want to eat dinner at 8 (as opposed to the Spanish 11).

And.

Portuguese restaurants often feature outdoor bbqs. (Did I mention we are a bbq loving family.)

And.

A pair of turtles named Dulce and Ernesto who live at this hotel amuse my son.

And.

Our #2 child in my wife's belly is fluttering. Jenn describes it alternately as being brushed by butterfly wings or little bursts of bubbles. Hard to believe our son who has been merrily dropping rocks and sticks into road grates all over Spain and Portugal and who no longer sings EIEIO but demands our new car song was once also a flutterer.

I am happy.

. . .
The Car Song*

Red cars, blue cars, yellow cars, and green ones.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
Cars everywhere.
Vroom. Vroom. Vroom.
We drive the car.
Cars, cars, cars.
I like cars.

Big cars, small cars. New ones and old ones.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
Cars everywhere.
Cars all around.
Let's go to town.
Let's go drive.
We like cars.
Cars. Cars. Cars.

Bear cars. Fox cars. Hippo cars and weasel cars.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
Why is the bear in the car?
I don't know.
But I like cars.
Bears like cars.
We like cars.
So do bears.
Bears really like cars.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
Bears drive away.
Maybe looking for honey.
I don't know.
Cars. Cars. Cars.

Wait.
What about the weasel?
I've never seen a weasel in a car.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
It doesn't matter.
It's a fact.
Weasels like cars.
That's kind of silly.
Weasels are unlikely drivers.
Shut up and drive.
Weasels like cars.
The weasels drive away.
So do the hippos.
Cars. Cars. Cars.

Cars on the road.
Cars in the rain.
Cars on the turnpike.
Cars in the brain.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
Cars everywhere.
But what about bikes?
Bikes are good too.
Especially with banana seats.
I miss my stingray.
But this song is about cars.
Cars. Cars. Cars.

Let's start over again.
Not again please.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
You have no choice.
Sing the song.
The kid loves the song.
He loves cars.
Cars. Cars. Cars.
Vroom. Vroom. Vroom.
Here we again.
Back to the beginning.

My friend Frederick once said his goal in life was not to be a parent, but a grandparent. Here's why:

Te voy a comer on Vimeo

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being a parent... well at least no one told me: One morning you will be up at the grim hour of 5:43AM and through a miasma of sleep you will see your smiling son pick up an apple with both hands and begin to eat it.

It is the detail of the hands that, in an instant, triggers a concentrated rush of memory. In a wink you are not some groggy 39 year old guy standing in his boxers in the middle of his kitchen watching his son eat an apple, you are a kid excited to be holding that sticky apple, turning it round and round with both hands as you nibble away the bitter skin to extract the sweetness inside. You are inside this moment and it conjures up an entire era you had long forgotten. The smell of your mother's kitchen. The brown carpets of the 70's. How you used to start eating apples standing up, but would eventually plop down cross-legged concentrating on the task at hand. Suddenly stingingly awake and awash in an extreme almost overwhelming empathy you feel very much alive. It is 5:46AM.

These leaps in time happen with discombobulating regularity and are always triggered by the tiniest things: our son waving his fingers against the fading light at bedtime just before he slips into a dream and the hand falls to the pillow, two kids on the playground crouched down over a fallen pigeon's egg, the collection of pine cones, or the way his mother holds his head comforting him when the world is not going his way. Each little flashback not only connects you to your kid reminding you to be a little more patient and a little less harried, it connects you to yourself, and that is the most surprising thing of all.

I love Babar as much as the next guy, but when Jean de Brunhoff stopped illustrating after 7 boooks and his son Laurent took over, the series went downhill. Babar's Cousin: That Rascal Arthur?! Come on. Please.

Now I know where the idea for cousin Oliver was hatched.

5:45 I am poked gently in the fleshy parts of the face. I ignore this and keep my eyes closed. A small body climbs all over me.

5:55 Two tiny fingers are shoved in my nostrils.... Ok already I am awake.

5:57 We wave goodbye to mommy who disappears into the blankets, we close the door, and head upstairs.

6:02 My son has selected an apple. He is still a sleepy and keeps resting his head on me. We sit on the floor upstairs in the dim early light. Wordlessly I bite the apple and hand it to him. He bites the apple and hands it back. This continues until we are gnawing at the core. We watch the sky outside change from purple to red to orange to blue. By the time we are finished the sun has risen.

6:13 My son crawls over to a large cardboard box we have over in the corner of the room and he scoots himself in backwards. His hands reach out and close the flaps sealing it all up. He is waiting for me inside the dark box. A hand emerges from a hole in the top of the box. The fingers wave. I hear the smallest of chuckles as he detects the approach of my my footsteps.

6:20 We read. Previous favorites like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Animal Alphabet are ignored. Goodnight Gorilla is still at the top of the rotation (and why not as it keeps me amused even after a thousand reads), Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear is still a fav (the secret to effectively reading this one is to whisper what the animals are hearing). We're Going on a Bear Hunt and the simply titled Trucks are gaining favor fast.

6:36 While sitting on my shoulders Raul Andres likes to bounce a ball to the floor so that I will run and catch it. This is usually followed by a healthy bout of spinning around until everyone is dizzy.

6:45 My son plays quietly with his trucks on the floor allowing me to catch up on the news. Occasionally he'll run over to show me a particular feature of a particular truck and will then go back to zooming them around (double fisted) on the ground. We're having fun. Happy Times.

Our son is (finally) starting to walk on his own, but he's fairly stealthy about it all. For example I'll catch him in the mirror and turn from brushing my teeth. Like a wild animal caught in the highbeams he will freeze and quickly drop to the floor. Jenn says seeing him walking is like spotting a unicorn.

I've had a couple of dogs in my lifetime although I don't have one now. New York despite it's abundance of smells is a cruel place to keep an animal who's great love is roaming around in the woods. I am thinking of a particular dog from my childhood. He's been gone for a while now. I was wondering if he ever dreamed of me and if so was I me or was I just some friendly anonymous human. Did he dream in color as I sometimes dream in black and white?

Often if I see a tourist taking a picture of something, I will step into frame just as he puts the camera to his face. Sometimes if it's a group shot and I'll step behind the group while the camera is being adjusted, step out quickly for the shot, and then head off before anyone notices. Over the years I've done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I've never told anyone. My wife will learn this small secret when she reads this post. I think of those pictures sometimes... I imagine them pasted in albums, lost in Parisian shoeboxes, and perhaps even hung by magnets on a few Japanese refrigerators... out there... somewhere. Do they wonder about the guy standing there with the slight grin?

My son is into bellybuttons right now. He likes to poke them and explore their depth. If you meet him don't be shocked if he goes for yours and gives it a good poke. Watch out.

Bears in the kitchen
Bears in the den
Bears take over
Now and again.

Bears love honey
Bears love trout
Bears day in
Bears day out.

Bears Bears Bears

Bears on the subway
Bears in the tree
Bears in traffic
On the BQE,

Bears Bears Bears

Bears on their tummies
Bears on the phone
Bears on safari
In the land unknown.

Bears got rhythm
Bears got game
Bear in the mirror
One and the same.

Bears Bears Bears

Bears slip away
Bears disappear
Bears gotta sleep
Until next year.

Sleep sleep sleep.
The bears go to sleep.
Snuggle up. Snuggle up.
Zzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzz. Zzzzzz.

I've always claimed Santa is more than a little scary... a big chubby guy in a red felt suit with an unkempt beard and rubber boots. Chills.

Witness my son (who seems to love everyone and is generally all smiles when he meets new people) encountering old St. Nick for the first time:

Hard to believe in a few hours it will have been a year since our son's dramatic entry into this world. Noting the date early this morning the dizzying speed which time reels us through life felt overwhelming, but the room was still dark, Jenn and the baby were still asleep, breathing in unison, and I was reminded that this year has also taught me to appreciate the slowness of things .

Even though he was large as far as newborns go, in looking back at 12 months of pictures I ask myself that phrase that comes to all parents at some point, "Was he really ever that small?"

One per month.

What's he thinking about?

One of the most fascinating things about being a first time parent is watching things click in your kid's head. One day they they are trying to eat the pages of the book... then one day they start turning pages... then pointing out people and animals in pictures... and then, finally, sitting quietly and turning all the pages and going back to the beginning to see everything again.

I got 3 emails about baby pictures today...

Here are 2 from a few hours ago.

Jenn keeps making me crop her... I might have to disobey her orders soon.

Whatever works right?

Several of my friends had babies within a month of us... and it seems that right now we are all dealing with a period of newborn development that happens between 2 and 6 weeks called the adaptive stage in which they fuss often, cry loudly, and are hard to put to sleep. The only thing that soothes the child is his mom. So what to do. In our case we have been going through a small library of books and asking friends with older kids for advice. But frustratingly the books (and our friends) have a range of suggestions often contrary to one another. On one end of the spectrum you have those who say that you should stop jumping ever time the baby cries, establish a routine stick to it, and let the baby cry it out; at the other end you have those who say the baby wants what it wants and for now your job is to fulfill those needs as much as possible. Particularly troublesome for us and most of our friends is the child's tendency to snack... ie to have small feeds and fall asleep at the boob only to wake and appear to be hungry 45 minutes later only to have another tiny snack. The snacking seems to leave the baby more gassy than when he has a big spaced out feeds (and of course the gas leads to more crying). This is particularly hard on the wives who barely have a moment for themselves.

These are the general solutions suggested both by friends and in the books:

Method 1: Don't "reward" the baby for crying by running to him each time he gets hysterical. Establish a fairly strict routine of sleep and feeding with at least 3 hours between feeds. Hold and comfort the baby only when he is not crying, and otherwise let him cry it out. Train the baby, don't let him train you.

Method 2: Map your babies habits fairly rigorously and establish a flexible routine based on his needs. Try to space out feedings as much as possible but don't let the boy get to the shrieking level. The baby is probably using the boob for comfort because he is over-stimulated. A good portion of his crying is not because he's hungry, but because he's tired. Try to get him to sleep much more than you are doing by limiting stimuli, putting him in a darkened room with some white noise. Also limit visitors and trips out. Try wrapping him tightly and allowing him to calm down before the crying gets into the crazy phase. Try having him sleep in a bassinet. Also make sure to put him down before he starts fussing and try soothing him to sleep in the crib (as opposed to in your arms rocking and stimulating him). The more he sleeps the less he will cry and more time you will have between feedings.

Method 3. The baby is in the 4th trimester. It's not even really human yet and in survival mode. It's brain is only 20% functional and what you need to do is simulate the womb environment where he is rocked, fed, warm and comfortable all the time. If he wants the boob, give him the boob. If he wants to feed for 10 minutes let him feed for 10 minutes. The child doesn't understand cause and effect yet. Comfort him by simulating the womb with gentle rocking, by swaddling tightly, and by using white noise. Just know that this phase will end in about 6 weeks and then you can start establishing routines.

#1 doesn't work for us. Neither of us has the ability to just let the kid cry. Also from what I understand about newborn development they don't understand causality so any Pavlovian training you might achieve might also leave the kid with a sense that world isn't secure... I understand why this technique might work later but for newborns...well, not for ours.

Method #2 makes the most sense to me, and I do believe newborns are generally overstimulated (all those new nerve endings are firing at once). Jenn tends towards Method #3 and that's generally what we've been doing, but we're being flexible in trying to figure things out. Ultimately #3 does work for us. The baby does calm down when he feeds and does sleep in Jenn's arms. But the burden is all on Jenn. Other than taking the baby out for stroller rides (which put him right to sleep), method 3 is very mom-centric.

In the meantime. I've created this handy chart for tracking sleep/wake/diaper. In the sleep column I just X out the blocks where he's asleep and use a A for agitated. C for crying. Q for quiet. L for Alert. G for hysterical. In the Feed column I draw boobs with numbers in them for the number of minutes on each. You can probably figure out the diaper column on your own. The chart really helps you get a sense of what's going on and where you might be able to tweak things. For example yesterday we realized the baby had gone almost 7 hours without a decent sleep. That's bad news for a newborn.

---
Update on the previous post.

Peter's body was not identified, but might have been one of the ones found and quickly buried on Wednesday (there were few foreigners in Kahawa). Peter's wife Alva is apparently on a flight scheduled for later this week and is staying with friends near Colombo. The house was seriously damaged and later looted. Alva is considering leaving Sri Lanka permanently. I have heard all this 2nd hand, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the information. The family will probably set up some sort of of charity based fund in Peter's name. I'll admit I've been thinking about this all day...