Babies

Some of you probably know that we live right near a Whole Foods; in fact, it's a pleasant 12-minute walk from our house, and right now that walk takes you past three constantly humming refrigeration trucks, full of organic turkeys that are gradually finding their way into Baltimore hums in preparation for Thanksgiving. It's a walk that Cleo and I have made, using various modes of transportation (Baby Bjorn; car seat stroller; jogging stroller) many, many times, and it's hardly surprising, then, that we've become pretty familiar with the store, and its generous employees, who always seem willing to coo over a baby. Cleo points to the muffins, arranged in a window, when we near the bakery; often, she'll ask for one. Over the months, we've learned, in a geography that loosely maps her development, the location of rice flour, whole milk yogurt, and cheese animal crackers. And, as we've walked about the store, we've also seen hints of what she might become, in the guise of other tiny shoppers.

Watching other children has become both sharply relevant and truly interesting to me, as they often suggest roughly comparable but also distinct trajectories of development. Infants, nestled and asleep in their car seats, recall the full, simpler early days of parenthood. Children who pull at their parents' shirt hems while pointing to the sushi suggest upcoming complexities and real delights. But, for some reason, it's often been the one-year-olds who point to Cleo and say, in an improperly loud and direct manner, 'Bay-Bee,' who have usually melted my heart.

And now Cleo, I'm happy to say, is one of those. She's been saying Mommy (or, more recently, Mama) and Dada for several months now. As I've mentioned, she has a relatively wide range of animal sounds that she can whip out when she hears a dog or (more rarely) sees a horse. But it's really only in the last month that she's begun to add nouns to her roster of words. One of those is mirror, which she's only used a few times. Another, in heavier rotation, is Papa, which she used to greet one of her grandfathers (as well as, somewhat confusingly, her grandmother). She asks, in any given day, about six or seven times to hear Old MacDonald by abruptly announcing, Eee-Eye-Eee-Eye-O. And a final emerging word, now, is Baby, which she has used in relation to a few other small children and, yesterday, in looking at a mammoth billboard picturing a baby on the way to Whole Foods. Yes, indeed: that's a baby. And, in pointing it out, you are, I suppose, now something more than a baby.

But that's not to say that all of her evolving words make total sense to us. One of her favorite terms is koo-kah, which has caused the two interpreters on hand - that's L. and I - some real confusion. On the one hand, it clearly means clock: when our grandfather clock rings, Cleo will often toddle over to it, and point, announcing koo-kah. She's also been using the same word to happily point out, over the last couple of weeks, all face clocks in the immediate environment. At first, then, I assumed it was perhaps a derivation of cuckoo clock - a term that we used, once, in a group nursery rhyme. But just yesterday she used it to refer to a round sign and, this morning, to a circular light fixture. And so our interpretations change: perhaps it's a rendition of circle, and is simply applied most frequently to clocks?

Much of parenthood, I'm realizing, is simply trying to find the order in the apparent chaos: is the child trying to articulate a distinct need, in her wails, or a known tune, in the apparent chaos of a violently played violin? And the frequent difficulty of answering such questions helps to explain the simple delight that comes from watching a one-year-old point to a baby and say, distinctly, Baby. Yes. Yes.