If you’re not Talmage’s grandparents, you probably won’t be interested in this submission—move on. This is more talk-about-your-kid time. I wanted to document some of the recent Talmage-10mo.-isms before they’re forgotten.
. We take showers with Talmage. So he knows what’s happening on the other side of the obscured glass door. Sometimes, or usually, when Talmage knows you’re in the shower he’ll crawl up to greet you by banging his palms on the shower door. I respond with a “palm bang” opposite his on the other side of the door. Yesterday, he started doing blowfishes.
. When Robin works her 12-hr Saturday shifts I get plenty time with my son, as I sometime say: Talmage and Briton, mono a mono. I’ve been out of the loop lately on what he eats, beyond the ‘sprinkle Cheerios on the high chair tray’ to keep him occupied. We’ve stopped stocking the Gerber goo, so you have to be more creative when deciding what to feed him. Yesterday afternoon I quandered (ie. was in a quandary)... and then remembered Robin saying he can eat bananas. I didn’t realize he was going to consume an entire banana right there.
. Talmage does well to play the part and put up with me sometimes. When putting him to sleep, I tried holding him in his darkened room and swaying side-to-side singing a lullaby. He began to feel limp on my shoulder and I knew it was near time for that risky move to lay him in the crib. As I was about to start, he suddenly reared up, lifted a superman fist to the stars and exclaimed “Rrraa!” Seeing he completely startled me, he grinned and gazed at me with conniving eyes. Oh boy, I thought, this is going to be harder than expected. But then he went limp again on my shoulder, as if to say, “C’mon daddy, I know you’re going to put me in that crib. Why don’t you just get on with it...” So I did and he went to sleep without a fuss.
. Talmage, perhaps like most babies, is incredibly fascinated with light, and sources of light. He loves to look at lights, see them go on and off, and try to touch them. He’s become quite an expert on the lights in our house, and the other night he shared with me some of his deep knowledge. We have a light fixture in the dining room, a basic three-lamp piece suspended from a chain. We also seldom have a table underneath, so you can walk
right up to it (in fact, I often bonk my head on it). A real hit is to spin the fixture on its chain. Talmage gazes intently as the lights twirl around. He’s discovered, particularly at night, that the lights reflect in the windows, and he loves to track the reflections too. He revealed to me the symmetry of light in the south wing of our house. Talmage created this scientific diagram showing the four sources of reflection he discovered, and he’s diligent about checking all of them when the light is on:
. Robin lets the chickens roam free in our backyard now. Talmage loves to stare at them, and growl.
. With the weather getting nicer, I’m starting to drive around with the windows down. The draft produced in backseat is pretty intense and Talmage loves getting his hair whipped around. When we’re stopped at a light to turn left, cars wiz by at high speeds on either side of us. Peering back at Talmage, I see his head turn quickly from side-to-side as he tries to get a glimpse of these new noise makers on the road.
. Our son has this red/blue outfit, like a one-sie but the bottom snaps down the legs part-way to form, uh, shorts. They’re like coveralls with legs cut just above the knee, and short sleeves (so not really like coveralls). The other day Talmage was motoring around, and crawling up on things as usual, in this outfit. The bottom half wasn’t snapped—at all—forming a priestly skirt look. In fact, it looked like he had joined the ministry.
. The cupboards and drawers in the kitchen all have kid-locks on them, except for the cupboard with the spacious though inaccessible inside which takes up that awkward corner space. This is Talmage’s cupboard. He sits or stands and plays with his things that are stored therein. His treasures include water bottles, plastic Gerber food packages (they function as great little tupperwares), a food masher handcrank, breastpump hoses and other stuff. It takes little time for him to spill his wealth out onto the kitchen floor. An amusing sequence can then ensue. He’ll step on one of the tiny, see-through plastic Gerber food package lids, which subsequently sticks to the bottom of his foot. When he takes another step, that foot now glissades along the linoleum as he struggles to balance himself and comprehend what’s happening.
