“The stars are sleeping.”

It’s becoming clear to me that most of my parenthood reflections lately are centered around language. That makes sense -- I have a language teaching background and my daughter is in the process of acquiring language.

But I never expected the changes in her language to be so dramatic so quickly.

On the drive to a gymnastics class for Eleanor, we listened to a story on Colorado Public Radio about a new study examining sleep in young children. The story itself -- telling us that children’s brains are developing really fast and that connections are consolidated during sleep -- wasn’t surprising or particularly revelatory. However, this fact (from the CU press release about the study) stuck with me:

“They also found that the strength of the connections between the left and right hemispheres increased by as much as 20 percent over a night’s sleep.”

Twenty percent! That’s crazy! But what I’ve seen in the last week at least anecdotally confirms the possibility of this kind of leap.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about more cute, cool things that Eleanor says for the last couple of weeks. I make a mental note every time there’s a new phrase or a new way of constructing sentences. Fast forward to today, and it feels impossible to keep up. It’s incredible. Just the last week has been one of the most astonishing of my life. My wife went back to work after the Winter Break, and I expected to struggle mightily with the transition. And there were struggles, to be sure. A resurgence in explosive, unexplained tantrums is just one front in the transition war.

But the fact is that being able to have real, functional conversations with my 19-month-old daughter has been perhaps the most meaningful experience of my life.

Here are a few of the phrases and sentences she’s uttered in the last week (context in parentheses):

• “Stars...sleeping.” (Gazing at the sky, under the noonday sun)
• “Eleanor eat toast...honey.” (nodding vigorously as she replies to the question, “What do you want for breakfast?”)
• “Wait turn.” (Hands clasped behind her back, waiting for the toy tunnel to clear in the library storytime play area)
• “Mommy sing choir church” (On Thursday night, while Daddy does bedtime while Mommy is at church choir rehearsal)
• “Mommy...here” (She says, all day Monday after Mommy returns to work after the weekend)
• “Papa (grandpa) ship. Mama (grandma) ship. Eleanor boat.” (Eleanor’s spoken desire to join her grandparents on their recent cruise)
• “Ottoman Game?” (Any time Daddy sits in his favorite armchair, near the ottoman Eleanor likes to leap off of into Daddy’s arms)
• “Climbing.” (In response to Mommy saying, “What did you do at gymnastics class today?”)
• “All town” (omitting “through the” which are the words she doesn’t understand in the “Wheels on the Bus” song)

The development speed is dizzying. Because she’s a really verbal kid (no surprise there), I’m getting to witness a brain getting wired in real time. What she talks about and the way she talks about it indicates in the most elegant way how her brain works and what she understands and what she remembers. She strings series of objects together because objects make sense -- she can see them and they can fall into categories or systems. In certain environments, objects exist and processes occur. If we’re at the library, there are books and toys and friends and snacks and turn-taking. If we’re eating breakfast, there are base foods and toppings and the highchair and the pink or purple bib.

If I ever return to teaching in a formal setting, I will hopefully remember this process my daughter is going through. People build on what they know. They will experiment tentatively, but only if they feel safe enough to make mistakes. They’ll keep learning and expanding their schema if they keep having successful interactions with the content.

But academic pursuits notwithstanding, I am so privileged to be a part of this little girl’s life. She is an amazing kid, and she’s almost always soaring through these experiences with a beaming smile on her face. I’ll try to remember that during the next tantrum.

For Eleanor, the stars really are sleeping. Something so beautiful, so way up in the sky, must need lots of rest so they can stay up there and shine so bright all night long.

"Hat coat go car class."

That was one of my daughter’s first “sentences.” While it’s missing all sorts of parts, it’s hard to argue with the clarity, simplicity, logic, and effectiveness in communicating a very specific thought.

The aforementioned sentence was uttered a couple of weeks ago during the hour-long process of exiting the house to get to Eleanor’s second swim lesson. She was very excited, and I could see the wheels turning in her head as she processed the order of events necessary to experience swimming. She paused between each word, pronouncing them carefully to make sure I understood her.

It was a bitterly cold morning in a series of bitterly cold mornings, so Eleanor knew we wouldn’t be leaving the house unless she put on her hat and coat. Once those conditions were satisfied, then it was time to go to the garage. Then we get in the car and go to class.

Simple enough concept, but if you think about the working memory necessary to communicate all these words in a relatively logical order in a short period of time, it’s impressive. Anyone who’s learned a second language and then found themselves in a country where that language is the native tongue can attest to the difficulty of real-time expression. When you’re excited, you’re highly motivated, but you’re also easily flustered. My daughter’s resiliency in the face of impending sensory overload in the pool makes me smile. It also fascinates me.

The sheer number of words in her vocabulary astonish me. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I (briefly) attempted to keep track of my daughter’s new words. I gave up a few weeks ago because I couldn’t keep up anymore. She’s using 3 to 5 new words a day, at least, and that’s been fairly consistent for a couple of months. I need to explain that this isn’t meant to sound like bragging. I find development fascinating, and while I am particularly gleeful to be able to enter into real conversations with my daughter, I recognize the vast differences just among the children I’ve known in my life. Everybody moves at their own pace, and most kids end up in pretty similar places, cognitively speaking.

Book book book bus bus bus moon moon moon stars stars sky walk go mall play shoes shoes shoes socks socks socks (apple)sauce!

These are popular words in my daughter’s lexicon. It is a corpus mostly consisting of nouns, a few verbs and a very, very short list of adjectives. I suspect that in her mind they are all nouns, really. “Go” is naming a thing that happens more than a word conjugated to get a subject acting in some way.

I love listening to the way she uses prior knowledge and phonetic success to build new words. “Book” has led to “Boot.” “Socks” has led to “Sauce.” The fact that the only characteristics these words share are phonemes and part of speech leads me to believe that her unspoken, understood vocabulary is gigantic compared to the words she can say.

I love being witness to this language acquisition process. I used to be a Spanish teacher, so I am predisposed to love watching someone figure out how to communicate. But it’s really special to watch my daughter figure it out. I feel like I’ve been waiting for this moment for her entire life.

It’s pretty cool.

The first tantrum

It was about pants.

My daughter loves to do everything herself, when it’s developmentally possible or not. Little did I know, as a (still) new parent, that this aspect of her temperament would directly lead to a 30-minute screaming meltdown.

A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor woke up cranky from her nap. Aside from crankiness, which makes everything more difficult, her current dislikes include vegetables and diaper changes. We struggled through getting the new diaper on -- it was such a frustrating experience that I didn’t even bother with her pants as I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. When I returned to my daughter’s room, I noticed that she was making a valiant attempt to put on her own pants.

Normally, I would applaud such initiative. But I was tired and feeling the need to get past the diaper changing trauma and on to the next activity of the day. Without thinking about it much, I lifted my daughter to her feet and pulled up her pants for her.

I chose...poorly.

This unthinking decision angered my nascently independent toddler to a level I’ve never experienced before. She exploded in rage -- my sweet, good-tempered, happy and smiley and always active daughter. She ran screaming from the room, quickly collapsing to the floor in the hallway. She kept the screaming fit going through pretty much every room in the house. She’d cry, her arms flailing until she would run into something, which would give renewed purchase to her fury. We finally ended up in the family room, where she picked up a puzzle and threw it to the ground. She dropped beside the puzzle -- still screaming -- picking up pieces and flinging them about in futility. She was reduced to writhing on the floor, amidst puzzle pieces she was too exhausted to chuck across the room anymore.

I tried several strategies to deal with this tantrum. I tried ignoring her -- I shut her inside her room and walked away, only to hear her screams reach an even stronger pitch. I picked her up and sang a song. I tried to read her a book, and then I tried making silly faces and then I tried letting her burn out the anger.

Nothing worked.

Eventually, we walked outside -- it was 40 degrees -- and we started talking about the sad tree and the happy tree. The sad tree is a crabapple in our front yard that never seems to get any bigger. It’s lost all its leaves and always looks a little pathetic. The happy tree is a glorious old linden tree in our backyard. Standing under that tree is one of my favorite things to do, in any season. The leaves turn a wondrous gold before dropping into my gutter.

I told my daughter that touching the happy tree always makes me feel better. I convinced her to follow my lead. It worked, and a smile even creeped onto her face. It wasn’t enough, mind you -- we still had to walk around for another 15 minutes outside until Mommy came home. By then, my crazy firebrand had calmed down. For them (my wife and my daughter), it was like the tantrum never happened.

I’ll never forget it.

Stuff my daughter says (16 Months, 3 weeks)*

Book

More

Milk

Car

Bus

Shoes

Daddy

Ma

Hat

Park

Hi

Bye

Hey

Uh-Oh

Hot

Go

Heart

Ride

Read

Bat

No

*I have a couple real posts coming, but I wanted to document this language development before it got lost in the shuffle of life.

My daughter, the helper

We seem to have moved into a new development in toddler-hood lately: the “helping” stage.

My daughter likes to help me do everything. If I’m putting together a shoe rack, she hands me the pieces to assemble. (Though I may not need the piece she hands to me.) If I am cooking in the kitchen, she pulls out utensils so she can make a side dish. (I may need those utensils, or I may trip over the whisk she’s left in her wake.)  If I’m doing the laundry, she will throw clothes into the hamper, or into the washer. (Usually clean clothes.) If I am putting her books back on the shelf, the shelf from which she has ripped every book down only moments before, she will pick up a book and try to shove it back into place. (I can put every book back in the time it takes her to attempt one). And after seeing me throw a can into the recycling bin, she will put in (or take out) all sorts of things.

I should mention that my daughter isn’t just a helper. She’s a noticer. If something about her environment changes, she investigates immediately. If there’s a new toy in the room, or the furniture’s been moved, or daddy just finished using whatever implement for the first time in a while, then she must explore the change. This is fun to observe, in theory, but it means that it’s difficult to accomplish anything with her underfoot. She’s just exploring and trying to understand her environment, but it can be frustrating when she gets in the way.

It’s a fascinating combination of developments that she’s going through -- she helps, she mimics, and she openly, intentionally pushes boundaries and defies limits.

Last week, I yelled at my daughter. I lost my cool, as she pulled out yet another bottle or cardboard box out of the recycling bin after I told her not to for the 20th time that day. It bothers me that I don’t even know what it was. I’m sure she’s forgotten the evil roar that came out of my mouth, but I haven’t. I probably never will.

I constantly have to remind myself that she is a person with agency. She makes choices, most of which are based on her environment and how other people interact with it. She is intensely curious because she has agency -- for the first time in her life, she can make a choice and act on that choice. It must be incredibly hard to restrain herself.

For example: imagine discovering as an adult that you can fly. Then imagine two others humans, more than five times your size, telling you that you aren’t allowed to fly. These giant adults are very nice to you -- they feed you, play with you, clothe you, kiss you goodnight. You know that the biggest consequence of your defiance will be their disappointment.

That disappointment would mean a lot to you, wouldn’t it? But you’d still fly sometimes, wouldn’t you? I would. I’d figure that my giant protectors would forgive me eventually.

I think that’s how toddlers must feel, and I keep forgetting. And when I forget, and when I’m tired, I get frustrated. And that’s not her fault.

It’s hard not to cross the anger line. I have agency, and I have rules about how my house operates. When something about the environment that I’ve built changes, it’s hard to keep myself from intervening.

Man, I’m no better than a toddler.

Are all toddlers engineers?

My dad is an electrical engineer by training. He has spent much of his adult life taking things apart and putting them back together. He’s a tinkerer.
I’m not an engineer, and while I know my dad is deeply proud of me and the man I’ve become, I think he probably wishes sometimes that I’d become an engineer. I had the aptitude for it, as I always did well in math and enjoyed making things, but the pull of languages was stronger.

Now that I’m a father, I’m beginning to think my daughter may fulfill that engineering destiny and make her Grandpa proud, though I honestly can’t decide if I’m just witnessing toddler-hood.

My daughter is an ever-present example of entropy at work. There is no button she will not press, no tissue she will not remove from its box, no book she will not take off a shelf, and no puzzle she will not disassemble. If my wife and I didn’t clean up after her every night, there would be no livable space left in our house. I’m not even sure the house would still be standing, if it were up to my daughter.

Here’s the thing, though. It sounds like an incredible amount of wreckage, if I’m just describing the spaces left in my daughter’s destructive wake. My 13-month-old isn’t just destroying everything in her path, though it feels that way sometimes. There’s something else going here, something constructive, something mysterious.

To incorrectly paraphrase Tom Waits, I ask, “What’s she building in there?”

The mental connections for Eleanor are coming fast and furious these days. I point to a picture of shoes in a book, and she grabs her feet. I ask her what sound the elephant makes, and she purses her lips like a trumpet player (though she can’t quite get the sound right). I set her down on the floor and she starts walking. She uses sign language to tell me when she wants milk, or even when she sees someone else drinking it. I ask her if she wants cereal, and she says, “No!”

I’m having a hard time catching all these connections in her brain, all these constructions she’s building and adapting as she processes more, newer information at an ever-faster pace. In education circles, they’d describe her evolving frames of reference as schema. She’s building physical and communication skills constantly, and they seem to be coming faster and building on top of each other faster than I can track. It’s impressive and it’s an amazing thing to experience firsthand. It’s not dissimilar to being a teacher and seeing the proverbial light bulb go on for a student, but the process is so much more powerful because it’s happening faster and it’s happening to your child.

Do all those engineers out there know something the rest of us adults don’t? That the secret to understanding the world is tearing it apart? That creation comes from destruction? I don’t have a lot of experience being around toddlers, so I suspect that much of what I am seeing is developmental, but I think we can learn something from these engineers, be they electrical or of the two and a half foot tall variety. Don’t be afraid to take things apart and put them back together. You might learn something.

Last week, my daughter started building things you can see. We have this old-fashioned wooden cylinder puzzle that she has been ripping apart for six months. For a while, she had this habit of meticulously removing each piece, one at a time. Then about four months ago, she started knocking it over and pulling out the puzzle base, spilling all the pieces at once. She seemed to figure out the fastest process for deconstructing the puzzle and then got bored with it for a few months. A couple of weeks ago, something strange happened. She started taking the pieces off one at a time again. And then she tried (for a few days) to put a piece back on the base. She kept failing, because she was only using one hand and she kept misjudging the distance between her and the puzzle base. But she kept trying, eventually with both hands holding the piece.

And then she got it, that first piece finally sliding into place. And then she put all the pieces back on. And then she started stacking other things on top of the puzzle, like books, or pieces from other puzzles.

Whatever she becomes when she grows up, I know one thing about my daughter right now.

She is an engineer.

Whatever she’s building in there, it must be pretty cool.

When do you let them fall?

I never knew that someone can be reckless and tentative at the same time until I met my daughter.

She crawls now, awkwardly. She cruises on our furniture, though she will only pull up if she’s climbing on me. She progresses so cautiously, like she’s rock climbing. It’s like you can see her brain planning the next move -- I’ll lift my leg now, and then I will lift my hand and put it right there and so on and so on.

But sometimes she’s just crazy and I fear for her life.

When I am carrying her and she sees something she wants, she will try to leap out of my arms with no regard for her own safety. Or if she’s standing up, holding onto the couch, sometimes she just lets go. And lately, while I put her on the bed while I get dressed, she seems to think it’s a fun game to crawl to the edge of the bed and peer over. I can’t decide if she just assumes I will catch her, thus preventing the possibility of pain, or if she just doesn’t comprehend the potential consequences.

A session of baby play last week makes me think she views me as both her personal safety net and locomotion assistance machine. She was holding onto the coffee table and noticed one of the tv remotes. It’s small and silver, and she loves to put it in her mouth. She gets really excited about this remote. It’s a symbol of power in the house, I suppose, and she probably thinks it’s magic. Anyway, I decided to experiment by putting it out of her reach in such a way that she would have to maneuver around the corner of the coffee table to get it. I was spotting her, of course, just waiting for her to lose her balance as she tried to get to the remote. Instead, she noticed my hand, grabbed it, and let go of the table to get around the corner. Once she was clear, she let go of my hand, reconnected with the coffee table and lunged for the remote.

She got it. And just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I set up the experiment again. Same results.

It’s an odd position to be in. Sometimes, I feel like she won’t ever try anything new unless I push her. But how does she learn consequences? I can’t just let her fall -- not yet. She’s not coordinated enough to keep from hurting herself. But how will she ever learn to do things on her own?

Part of me is happy that my daughter feels so secure that she just assumes I’ll always be there. It makes me feel necessary in a way I’ve never felt before. But how do you teach your kids resilience? How do they learn to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and try again?

When do you let them fall? How often do you let them fail? Is it too early to even worry about this?

Those who read this blog and others who know me might say I have been known to worry a little too much.

I obsess over my daughter’s naps, her development, her weight (she’s on the skinny side for a baby), her health (she has her first ear infection right now), her lack of teeth and hair, and just about anything else you could possibly worry about when it comes to a perfectly healthy, happy child. During Spring Break, for example, we were staying at my wife’s parents’ house. Eleanor was sleeping peacefully in a crib in a different room than our own. But before I could go to sleep, I just had to go in her room and check to make sure she was breathing. Seriously? I hadn’t done that since she was about three months old. I thought I was past that level of ridiculous, irrational fear!

Well, as I figure this out, I’ll keep spotting my daughter in her quest for independence. For now, I’ll catch her as many times as she needs me, but I’ll try not to get in her way. Maybe she’ll tell me when she’s ready.

P.S. I wrote the first draft of this post on Thursday of last week. In the intervening days, she has learned to go around corners by herself and pull up on some low level furniture. She even crawls up and down the two stairsteps in our house, and she has started to walk a little bit only holding one of my hands. I am in awe of her new skills, and I am having a hard time processing the speed of change. Now, if she could progress like this and still take her normal naps (absent the last three days), that would be great :)

Does it really get better?

Does it really get better?

(No, I’m not talking about the LGBT anti-bullying initiative, which is a wonderful program that I fully support.)

With every struggle I’ve experienced as a parent, I’ve received encouragement from a variety of sources. People are incredibly gracious, and parents, as a group, seem to be extraordinarily empathetic. Every parent I know seems to have a soft spot for the struggles of other parents, particularly those parents who have kids younger than their own.

My daughter is 8-1/2 months old, but I already find myself in the position of veteran among some friends and acquaintances. My heart goes out to every parent (or would be parent) who has a younger baby than I do. I’ve gotten to the point where some of the parents at the library storytime have babies who are younger than my daughter. I hear their struggles, and I feel for them, especially if I have experienced the particular struggle they describe. I know what it’s like to have a baby who rolls over pretty early, only to have the skill disappear for more than two months. I know what it’s like to be anticipating and fearing the transition to solid foods.

In my own struggles, I’ve noticed a recurring refrain among parents with babies/kids older than mine:

“I promise it gets better.”

Does it?

Honestly, that’s one piece of advice that I don’t like to give. I think it’s more accurate to say:

“Parenting is hard. The thing that’s hard to deal with right now may be a phase, or it may just be a part of parenting that you get used to.”

To put it another way:

“It gets different.”

In a way, however, I suppose it really does get better. You become more attuned to your child’s needs, and your child gets better at communicating what her needs are as she gets older.

Every day is new, and my experience of a parenthood struggle has as much to do with me and my ability to be patient, weather change and accept uncertainty as it does with my daughter’s actual behavior. I’d also say that in my experience, every week seems to bring a new phase, or a regression, or a new skill, or a new wrinkle.

All I know for certain is that I love my daughter and that parenting is hard and that each kid is different and that none of us really know what we’re doing and everything about parenting is always changing.

More and more, I think that the key to being a parent is learning to accept change and to not get too freaked out about it.

To be honest, the only thing that’s really getting better is my willingness to accept that fact.

“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.