The Babies ... Are Listening!

Words continue to tumble out of Munchkin, more and more and more words: jacket! hat! climb! on! off! cheese! sit! dragon! tickle! I wrote in my last post that I was amazed at her new capacity to speak--that her receptive language was good, but her ability and willingness to talk was new.

Ha.

All of a sudden, Pynchon and I noticed nervously over the weekend, it has become abundantly clear that Munchkin is actively listening when we talk. Not just when we talk to her, but when we talk to each other. She has developed the ability to pluck from a stream of adult conversation the one word that is meaningful to her, and to act on it. An example: last night, while bathing Munchkin, Pynchon and I discussed the wild rise of the Canadian dollar against the American, and how possibly the subprime mortgage credit crunch and the general bubble-state of the US housing market might play into this. (Yes, we're dorks. But Munchkin seems happy just farting around with her tub toys at this point, and she mostly gets clean by flailing around by herself, so why not pass the time in intellectually-stimulating chit-chat about international economic policy?). As the word "bubble" passed Pynchon's lips, Munchkin's hands flew up to her shampooed head. She rubbed hard before bringing her hands down in front of her: they were covered in bubbles, just like in her storybook where the main character "is funny in my bath, when I make bubbles in my hair."

From the nonsense stream of phonemes issuing top-speed from a conversation she's not party to--a conversation she assiduously ignored as she jammed Rubber Ducky into the little plastic bucket and then tipped him back out--she pulled 'bubble' from thin air, and linked it to a story in which bubbles can be found in one's hair. And found bubbles in her hair. Delighted, she exclaimed, "Bubble!" and Pynchon and I just let our jaws hang.

She's listening? Uh-oh.

* Baby ears not to scale.

Run, kitty, run!

Poor Crazy Kitty, our long-suffering, beleagered tabby. Not only do we largely ignore her since Munchkin's been born, we also lock her in the basement at night to keep her from meowing us all awake at 2am. And now, worst of all, the hairless cat replacement has become mobile and cat-obsessed. How cat obsessed? Well, the other morning, Pynchon and I were awakened to the sound of soft meowing. Coming from Munchkin's room and, in fact, emanating from Munchkin herself. Pulling into the driveway after daycare, Munchkin shouts out, as I have laboriously taught her, "HOME!" and then, unprompted and unschooled, points to the kitchen window level with her carseat and asks, "Cat?" because, once, when we pulled into the driveway she looked out her window and found herself face to face with PCK who was sunning herself there.

Munchkin's love for PCK is passionate: intense, and a little violent. The cat is subjected to rough pawings and much tail-pulling. Her feet are grabbed. She is chased. But the 'C' in PCK stands for 'crazy' largely because our cat lacks an instinct for self-preservation. She never evades Munchkin by more than two feet, and thus foils us in our parental attempts to avoid violence by separating the amorous baby from her much-mauled object of affection. The much-mauled object of affection simply will not take the opportunities for escape we so assiduously try to provide her with.

Now, Pynchon and I are reduced to forcibly holding back Munchkin, often in mid-lunge and apprehended by the chest, and hollering at the cat in increasingly frustrated tones, "RUN, KITTY!!! RUN!!"

Proving the law of unintended consequence, the only party to learn anything from this much-repeated practice is Munchkin, who has come to understand that the proper greeting to offer a cat upon whom you are about to pounce is, "Run! Kitty! Run!" And so that's what she shouts, as soon as she sees the cat, as soon as she is up on her feet about to give chase. The house rings with frantic feline mewlings and gleeful toddler warnings. Run, kitty, run.

We are noticing that Munchkin is absorbing language like a sponge lately. She has always really understood a lot of what we say to her. What is surprising is that it is, all of a sudden, coming back out.

In addition to the quite useful "run, kitty, run" phrase, this week Munchkin has learned: "lap" (while patting your leg), "shoe", "sleep", "nap" (while pretending to undertake said activity on the floor), Coco (her bear), "doudou", "milk", "bottle", "nipple" (in reference to her own, not the bottle's), "more" (accompanied by the sign, learned at daycare), and "please" (ditto). Her old standard, "up?", is of course still very much in use. More often than not, if you say a word and ask her to repeat it, she will. This is new.

Once more, I look at my Munchkin as though she is an alien being dropped into my house. When did my little lump of hair and hugs and hunger and grunts become a creature of language? This is one of those milestones, again, that kind of snuck up on me. When did her four or five spoken words suddenly become twenty? Suddenly become greater than my capacity to list? And, most surprising of all: the last couple of days, we're pretty sure she's calling me by name: mamammmaaaammmmaaaaamamama. Wow.

Critical Mass

Friday was 'critical mass' at my university: all the cyclists congregate at a given time and place, and commute en masse through the centre of town, to raise awareness of cyclists and cycling. I understand the point--hey cars! share the road!

Unfortunately, Munchkin and I got caught behind them as they blocked our road home. It was a matter of one red light. Waiting at the edge of the ring road at said red, I watched them all pull out, at least two hundred of them, from the parking lot across the street. I was dismayed. Our usual 8 minute commute home instead took half an hour and about 4 extra kilometres of travel. I wanted so badly to get home, to start the weekend, to unstrap us from our seat belts and park the car until Monday, to get out in the sun. Ironic, then, that the bicyclists trapped us on the road, trapped us in our car. I saw one of my students in the mass, weaving around, waving a flag. I support the cause. I've ridden in a critical mass ride before. I would love to ride my bike to work like I used to. But Munchkin changes things, changes me, changes what we, as a family, do, the choices we make.

This is my post for September's BlogHers Act Canada, on the topic of 'reduce'. And maybe on the challenges to said reduction posed by parenthood.

Reducing, for us, is a balancing act: we can reduce mileage on our car by taking the bus to daycare ... but this reduces also our time together as a family, and increases our commuting time. We could reduce packaging by shopping at the bulk grocery club store ... but this increases the mileage on the car and reduces our connection to our own neighbourhood, whose relatively expensive grocery store we can walk to. We could reduce waste by switching back to the cloth diaper service we used for the first seven months of Munchkin's life ... but we would increase by far the amount of laundry we do, the number of diaper changes and clothing changes and bedding changes from the leaks.

We try hard to remain conscious of the costs of our practices. It's never perfect. But neither is it hopeless, or zero-sum.

The choice: commuting by car, commuting by bus.
Pynchon takes the bus, and I drive Munchkin. Munchkin and I are both on campus, and Pynchon works in the opposite direction, so this makes sense. We drive, then, 8km per day. We did choose to buy a new car when I was pregnant, the smallest most gas-efficient model we could get, a car we intend to drive for at least ten years. We got a four-door Toyota Echo, and we're averaging about 20,000 km/year. Not bad. We're trying to be a one-car family, and to walk to more places. We're reducing our mileage.

The choice: groceries.
We buy from the local grocery store. We live in an uptown core and we think it's important to shop locally to support the merchants. This is more expensive, and we can't buy in bulk. We do, though, use canvas bags exclusively. And we do try to buy more from the periphery of the store than from the middle--that is, more fresh food and produce, and fewer packaged goods. That reduces our waste. We do buy soda in cans as well as bottles: we bring cans to work (save money) and recycle them there; we drink from bottles at home. We no longer buy bottled water. We bought bottles instead, and refill them at home. We're reducing some packaging, then, and again reducing our mileage.

The choice: housing and heating and cooling.
Our house is about a hundred years old, cheap, in the uptown area, a bit ramshackle. We spent a fortune to insulate it to reduce our heating and cooling costs. We have a mid-efficiency furnace, but it's pretty new and we're not going to replace it. We do have central air, but we try not to use it. Both heating and cooling are managed by a programmable thermostat that we bought and installed: we minimize nighttime and office-hours consumption. Our house is old and leaky and not terribly efficient. But on the upside we live in a neighbourhood where we can walk around, which is well-served by public transit, and which uses existing sewer and utilities infrastructure. So we are reducing the strain on 'green space' I guess. Our house is not big: at about 1800 square feet, it's smaller than average, but it means we try to have less stuff in it, trying to reduce our consumption and collection of the various Things that cost money and take up room.

The failures:
We'd like to feel virtuous, but often don't. I quite often forget my travel coffee mug at home; we buy individually portioned cookie snacks so that we don't overeat; we drive to the gym. We seem to go the mall a lot. And while we usually only put out one half-full black bag of garbage a week, our two quite-large recycling bins are overflowing. Our car is not a hybrid. Our baby wears disposable diapers and is cleaned by disposable wipes. I use a swiffer-style duster, and hate myself. At base, we try to reconcile our comforts with our consciences, and hope, over time, to have conscience win out more often, to have our sense of comfort moderated. We try to reduce--the size and number of our cars, the size of our house and yard, the packaging on the food we buy, the amount of waste we place at the curb--but it hardly seems to really cost us anything. We could do more.

Maybe next year Munchkin and I will join critical mass.

"I'm reducing the bummer-level of this post! Hooray!"

WW: Gender differences in parenting styles

Sunday night

Yesterday's biting wind and menacing skies gave way to today's blue sunny cheer, a quick change from fall to spring, windows thrown open that were yesterday shut tight against pelting branches and leaves. And so Munchkin too is changeable, a maybe-sick, maybe-teething, whirling dervish of a toddler: full-throated laughter changes to whining, crying breaks off into interested silence, a silly dance ends in a bad fall, a song in howls of pain, and then, again, a break in the clouds and a new word. Shoe! Walk! Home! Chip!

From flirtatious neck tilt and goofy smile to flailing screaming tantrum, and back, in a flash. Our weekend has been like this: the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, wildly oscillating extremes along the continuum of normal.

Pynchon is out tonight, a live martial arts demonstration event, but wishing he were home. I'm cooking, feeling a need to cocoon in my kitchen: broccoli casserole, chili, peanut loaf. Munchkin, suddenly feverish and red-cheeked at bathtime, sleeps fitfully upstairs. Every forty-five minutes or so she lets out an anguished, lone wail, then goes back to sleep.

L's cancer is terminal--he has been told he has one or two years. A cousin of mine died very suddenly and inexplicably this weekend. Her parents are devastated, and I am shocked. She was 44.

I spoon ketchup into a loaf pan, plop mushroom soup concentrate into a casserole. I breathe in the smell of cooking onions and try to feel safe.