Peeking into the rock

So maybe you saw how yesterday I witnessed a baby taking on a third language after listening to a mother talk to her baby for a couple of hours.

Today I participated in a six-month-old perhaps taking a first step, depending on how you want to count it. I don't think I want to count it as a first step, really, at least until I see when he actually starts getting from one place to another on his hind legs (with or without support). This is how it went:

I'm sitting on the floor like I usually do, and the baby -- who I will call Slugger because both his parents are high school athletes -- is trying to get me to help him stand up. How is he doing this? He puts his hands into the air and clutches at me fingers or my shirt and grunts and pushes himself a bit upward, trying to shift his weight into my hands. I am having none of this. "I will not help you stand up," I say cheerfully. "Because that's ridiculous. I will support you if you do all the work yourself, though."

And so that's what he does. He maneuvers my hands into position (lots of babies do this wh8en they want to sit up from lying down, or roll over from an awkward position, or stand up from sitting), and grips them hard and uses them to haul himself to standing. His feet are still little round baby feet balls, so this isn't really stable. He does a bit of the unstable-standing dance, and then moves my hands to the side and lets go of them and launches himself at my chest. Naturally, I have to catch him, but this is beyond ridiculous: it is epic and wonderful and absolutely hilarious. The "normal" time for this is maybe ten months, and you don't get worried unless it doesn't show up later than that unless the kid's not making some kind of progress over time or the kid has some kinesic weirdnesses that make you uneasy on their own.

Is that a step? I kind of think not really, although one foot left the ground and lurched forward ahead of the rest of him in a sort of step-like fashion. The trajectory and feel of the body, the directions the joints were (not) moving, some other things I can't really describe, were less like walking than I would usually call a first step. I told the parents about it anyway. It's hilarious and impressive and when you tell parents stories like that it makes their evening smoother when they go home with a tired baby, tired themselves and with several hours of homework ahead of them and most likely the baby's going to be cranky and hungry and not want to sleep conveniently. To have a thing like that to talk about just makes a more enjoyable time.

Later on, a toddler some months shy of two years old was jargoning incomprehensibly at me while I was holding the youngest of all. This toddler is tiny and elegant and has the world's best eyebrows: there are several rows of assymetrical hairs marching all around his forehead, like they're setting up for some arcane kind of round dance mixer sort of thing. Most of my conversations with him are about things with motors or the projected arrival time of his mommy, although some are about soccer (well, kicking balls and yelling "Goal!") This time he's talking about a wide range of subjects most of which I can't identify but after a while I think he's pointing out the kids in the yard, so I go into that. "Who's that? Who's this? Where's this kid?" -- like that. And I point to the baby in my arm, who is the new baby brother of one of the older toddlers, and I say "Who's this guy?"

And my little motorhead friend looks upwards and says, "The sky . . . airplane."

Yes, there had been airplanes all afternoon, some quite low and loud (on pretty days, especially when stuff like the Cold Water Classic is going on, we can get a lot of small-craft coast-buzzers around here). But dang. A pun! No, I do not believe it was merely a misunderstanding. I think he had an inkling of what I was talking about, didn't want to deal with tryign to figure out an answer with his limited vocabulary, and noticed that the sounds I was making could be applyied to something he felt more qualified to deliver an opinion on.

And my last story of the day. We have in the toddler yard -- whither we repair in the afteroons with our babies and combine the programs for dire financial reasons and then desperately try to make it into a good thing (and sort of succeed) -- two plastic climbing structures with slides (one of them is bigger than the linked one, but I couldn't find a picture of it). They pop together, and more often than we would like, they pop apart. Anyway, the slides are only anchored at the top end and the bottom end swings free, a good quality if you're tossing the toy into an uneven backyard. Today we had about four or five toddlers playing with these and also with these largeish plastic cube chairs

The older girl, the one whos ebaby brother I was holding, got this idea to haul one of the platic cube chairs under the end of the slide, which would make the slide stick out straight like a plank. It took several tries and the coordinated help of the two boys she was playing with to get it to work. It simply couldn't be done by one toddler. But once she got it to almost work the others figured out what she was tryig to do and helped by holding up the slide so she could slide the chair under. And then they all jumped and fake-jumped from the edge of the slide-plank for a good half hour, with only the slightest need for help in taking turns and not jumping on each other and not drastically changing the configuration in the middle of another toddler's jump. And I do mean only the slightest help. Then Motorhead Boy and a girl who had been contentedly pouring sand (and throwing it in wide circles sometimes when I didn't appear to be looking) joined in too and everybody who was big enough to get into the climber had turns.

And also. Big sister, the one who conceived this idea in the first place, started out not being able to jump. Really unable. She got to the edge and demanded a hand from an adult, and then eased herself off with a kind of slidey maneuver. By the time her mother arrived, she was really jumping all by herself. When her mother arrived she asked me "Can I show my mommy how to jump?" which sounds like asking for permission but I notice she uses that construction mostly when she wants to bring you in on a cherished project, and she is not so much asking for permission as asking for witness and endorsement. And then told her mother to say "You can do it [name redacted]. You're not scared. You're okay."

Though she had shown no signs of being scared even before she could manage the jump.

Dang, the kids are so smart.