“Hi Daddy.”

Being a stay-at-home parent, I find myself swinging from identifying everything my daughter does as a milestone to feeling like nothing ever changes. What this really means is that I feel like I’m either making things up or depending on other people who don’t spend every waking hour with her to tell me if something has changed.

“She’s gotten so big!” people say.

“Really? She looks exactly the same to me,” I say. “But did you notice that her babbling is more complex today?”

“I don’t know, she sounds like a baby,” people say.

The difference between the perspectives makes sense. I watch her all the time, so I don’t notice a lot of physical changes from day to day or even week to week, because they’re so gradual. But because I watch her like a hawk, I’m constantly looking for even the slightest developmental deviation from her norm.

So, my lesson for the day: Developmental milestones line the walls of a dangerous rabbit hole from which there is no escape or, to use another hole metaphor, developmental milestones are the event horizon for the black hole of parental insecurity.

I offer you two examples:

Example #1. Crawling

My daughter doesn’t crawl. She kind of inches toward things, occasionally, ending her quest by rolling over or turning in a circle and finding something new to grab. Honestly, she would much rather make googly eyes at people and smile at them until she breaks down all social boundaries. She also grabs things a lot. And she sometimes puts those things in her mouth. And she likes to walk around the room with me holding up her arms.

But she doesn’t crawl.

If Eleanor snakes her way toward a toy that’s more than a foot or two away, does that mean she’s “creeping?” If I want to make her development sound more impressive, I suppose I can call it that. Though, to be honest, she doesn’t seem the least bit interested in “crawling.” I can’t say I blame her. I don’t crawl. Her mommy doesn’t crawl. Why should she bother?

Most of the new parents I know have babies who are just a bit (three to five months) older than Eleanor. I occasionally see their children and I am in awe of their incredible, sophisticated physical coordination. They seem to be ready for elite gymnastics compared to my daughter.

Of course, I only see these kids every once in awhile and they are older than my daughter and it’s really an unbelievably stupid and unfair comparison game but I engage in it anyway even though I try not to.

Developmental milestones are so subjective! In fact, I direct you here for an interesting recent development in the debate about crawling.

Example #2:

I would not consider my daughter “verbal,” but she has uttered several variations of “Hi Daddy” over the last couple of weeks.

“Hey, Da-Da-Da.”

“Hey, Daddy.”

“Hey Da.”

“Hi Da-Da.”

I am not so vain that I think this actually connotes the same meaning in Eleanor’s head that it does to me, but I will take it. In fact, sometimes I even think she thinks that my wife and I are both “Da-Da.” I suppose I do believe that my daughter thinks this is some sort of way to greet the people who care for her when she remembers that they exist.

So, do I count this as speech? Has she spoken her first word? Who knows? The longer I exist as a parent (and I am going on eight months), the more I am thinking that these milestones every parent keeps track of are way more fluid than I once believed.

A fascinating aspect of the first word debate is the nature of language acquisition itself. It has been noted by many linguists how remarkably similar the words for mother and father are across the world. Hundreds of languages have essentially the same words to denote parents.

But don’t jump on the Tower of Babel train too quickly. Those same linguists have a pretty good theory as to why those words are so close, and it has (mostly) nothing to do with the common ancestry of languages.

“Ma-Ma” and “Da-Da” and “Pa-Pa” and “Ba-Ba” happen to be the first speechlike sounds that most babies make.

So what do I make of this? I think it means that parents have been making up developmental milestones for thousands of years. Apparently, we all cling to the hope that our babies are turning into normal, healthy children and we will use any evidence at our disposal, however flimsy.

***

When she was about four months old, my sister was playing with my daughter, saying her name over and over. Then Eleanor “spoke.”

“Ey-lah-no!”

She did this three times. She has never done it again. I choose to believe that, while I beamed with pride at the time, my daughter had no idea what sounds were coming out of her mouth. As an aside: I also choose to believe that my daughter’s first word is not a narcissistic declaration of her own identity.

I’d rather go with, “Hi Daddy.”

Being a stay-at-home dad is an excruciating exercise in waiting. I read the baby books and anxiously wait for (and sometimes preemptively identify) each new milestone that I am supposed to see next. But I’m never quite sure when they come, and I question their relevance anyway. I’m constantly trying to remind myself that it doesn’t really matter. Is she healthy? Is she happy?

If so, that’s good enough.