The casual reader and the smug neurotic mother whose children are now seven and twelve (and therefore possesses a section of her brain that smoldered away long ago in a self-destruct mechanism meant to keep us from eating our young after the age of four, when they are apparently no longer irresistibly cute and we might take out our revenge if the memories of their toddlerhoods were left intact) will read this and immediately refer me in their minds to some parenting website that recommends that you deal with a two-year-old and all of his boundless, joyful energy through the magical magic of redirection. ''That's a nice picture you're making. Can we do it in the bathroom so the whole house isn't covered in shit?'' To that person, I say, preemptively: shut the hell up. Normal people do not possess the creativity required to redirect the endless possibilities that gush forth from the mind of a two-year old (which I note, cannot be discriminated from the mind of a psychopath by a neurologist): I'm smashing this banana into the grate behind the refrigerator! I'm putting crayons in the dog's nose - why? There's a hole! I am capable of sustaining a high C at 900 decibels for one full minute and show no signs of oxygen depletion even though all the air has been sucked out of the room! I'm decorating in between the keys of the piano with cheese that I found under the couch where I stuffed it last week along with milk I poured in a truck! I just found the toilet plunger, and it seems it was recently used! I'm putting all of the clean laundry in the trash! I can redirect between 30-40 of these inbound flights of fancy, but they. just. keep.coming. And while they come, someone is yelling and pulling my pants down the whole time. Yes my pants. So there are just some times, Mr. Baby, when you can't be redirected like an affable pilot on his way into Heathrow. You need to just. fucking. STOP what you are doing.
Sometimes, this is a matter of safety. Like when you said you wanted to play in your room, and I took advantage of that time to get on the Internets, and your voice was right behind me saying hi mom, hi mom, hi mom, and it turns out you were on the ledge on the outside of the banister alternating (I must say, with amazing skill for a 24-month-old) your grip while leaning back over the eight-foot drop to the stairs, and from the look on your face your were doing it just to piss me off. That's a time, good buddy, when you need to FUCKING STOP. Or when you were ''watching'' me in the kitchen and surreptitiously grabbed all the knives off of the counter and then decided to play ''JUMP.''. Or when you had two delicate Polish teacups in your hands and were banging them together as they shattered into millions of pieces, and you just kept banging. Time to STOP.
It's often a matter of your little brother's safety. Like when you are ''feeding'' him by packing large pieces of banana into his windpipe. Or when you are ''taking'' him, and the vehicle you are using is overturned his face is being dragged on the floor. Or when you decide to ''baby-share,'' by tossing Hot Wheels cars at him from across the room.
Often, more than not, it's about cleanliness. I could go one forever here, about the compost and the flour and the soap and the toilet plunger and the beans and the rice and the books and the magnets and the blocks and the pillows and the blankets and how none of this needs to be vaporized and sprayed all over the place like an aerosol. Sometimes, there is still hope that fifteen minutes of my day can be salvaged from the endless garbage heap of the rest of my minutes, and not dedicated to the sweeping up or the mopping up or the vacuuming up of whatever you're about to get to work on with that supersonic sweeping hand motion. And then maybe I can use that time to go to the bathroom. So... you need to fucking STOP.
It is, sometimes, about noise. Sometimes someone is about to finish a sentence like, ''whatever you do, don't - '' on the radio. Sesame Street has to come to its inevitable end, and the wailing sound you make is not only useless but actually raises your mother's blood pressure to stroke levels. Certain words become annoying if they are repeated fifty thousand times in a monotonous voice and for no apparent reason whatsoever. Check it: truck, truck, truck, do you want it? truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck do you see it? truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck do you like it? truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck ...annoying. And I'm just writing here.
And occasionally it's just about being annoying. Like, I haven't talked to your father in a week. Not because he wasn't here, but just because somebody kept yelling truck, truck, truck, truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck truck. Or like, I just don't want somebody kicking me in the face for whatever reason.
But no matter what it's about, Mr. Baby, one thing is for sure. And that is this: STOP does not mean, keep doing whatever you're doing, but do it faster and more frantically! STOP! Please draw even more furiously on the table with that marker! STOP! Please hit compost container even harder with that mallet so that's it's a thousand times louder when it explodes all over the floor! STOP! Keep splashing your hands in the baby's poopy diaper and see if you can fling it all over the room, yelling ''Baby poop! Baby poop!'' But faster. And more furiously. STOP! I've been listening to this radio show for half an hour and they're about to tell me the secret to the universe, but please keep yelling, in fact, yell LOUDER so that I never find out what it is.
Yeah it's just...that's not what stop means. It means STOP! Stop the madness in the name of all that is holy and sane, for just two fucking minutes. And give me a second to think about how we can channel your desire to eat crayons while jumping off of the window ledge into something useful and safe, in a positive manner befitting my extraordinary abilities as a mother.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
On Choices
Dear Mr. Baby:
It is, admittedly, hard to accept the perpetual dissatisfaction of life that comes with realizing that the innumerable adages about it apply not only to the rest of those poor schmucks, but to you as well. However, I think you can embrace these disappointments on your own scale, and come to understand that sometimes the paradoxes - of what we think we want and what we really want, and what we can really have, and what is actually, physically possible in this world - leave us only with the choice to accept that, in point of fact, one cannot have his cake, and cram it into his diapers, and throw it at the dog, and mash it into a fine paste to be smeared on the wall, and stick it up his nose, and drop it in tiny pieces into his sippy cup that someone has been foolishly convinced to ''[take the] top off [of],'' and eat it too.
Sometimes you do not feel like having your pants changed, because it (apparently) makes your head hurt, and you simultaneously have an extremely uncomfortable, or very large, pile of shit in your pants and would like someone to do something about it.
Sometimes you want to engage yourself in the task of filling a jar of water from the bathtub water into which the jar is overflowing, and you also want to watch Sesame Street, and you are disappointed even furtherly by the fact that you live in the house of people who followed their literary and musical hearts to the inevitable conclusion of poverty and there is no TV in the bathroom, which is explained to you in only the gentlest of cynical tones, and then, after arguing about it incomprehensibly for ten minutes, you decide you actually want to take a walk.
Sometimes you want to eat bread and stuff it in your sippy cup, and you don't want wet bread or, and I quote again, ''trash milk.''
Sometimes you want tomatoes, and then while they are being sliced, you seem to think you want pears, and then when they are on your plate, you want to scream ''May-nose! May-nose!'' and throw your pears all over the walls, because now you want tomatoes, but you might want the pears scraped off the wall and placed back on your plate so you can start screaming about tomatoes again.
Sometimes you want to sit on your potty, and then when taken there by the hand you get very upset, because you don't. And then when someone tells you, that's okay, you begin crying and yelling, ''potty potty potty!'' because you do want to sit on it. But you will also scream, no no no! and kick someone in the face because you don't.
And so this is when you have to make choices, and I know they are hard, but one does not get out of the crisis by alternating constantly and for seemingly unlimited periods of time between the two choices. And I see you are building yourself a cross over there, but let me just remind you that your father is Polish, and your mother is mostly Irish, and you have spent a grand total of 23 minutes in a Catholic church before being removed due to a lack of solemnity. We will double this amount because it was Easter, but still. You got nothing on us.
Anyway, you're in for a real ride if this is how you're going to be about it. As time marches indefatigably on, sometimes you might want to use your intellect, but will also want to spend your entire day engaged in the Sisyphean task of wiping up juice that didn't need to be poured all over the floor for the ninetieth time in 36 hours. You will want to purchase a package of gum of your own (and try to eat a piece of it, before bedtime, because, by contorting your neck and painstakingly, over a period twenty minutes and with one hand, unwrapping it and shoving it into your mouth after yelling, "Look, horsies!'' while passing an empty field, you are convinced that you can defeat the x-ray vision of a toddler in a car, which will pierce the seat and set off a stentorian alarm from the back that cannot be dismantled), but you will also want to purchase books whose spines are snapped ten minutes after they are opened and whose ''toddler-proof'' pages are promptly eaten to the intellectual betterment of no one, so you will be too poor to buy that gum. You will accept so many lies about whether or not pieces of food will be crammed into this or that crevice or orifice of this or that baby or dog, that you will remain in a confused fetal position at the end of the day, defeated, and you will want to read Moby Dick or do yoga like you had planned. With windswept hair, and a drink in your hand. But you will make choices. Choices that might seem misguided without the context: a small person wanders around your house, occasionally ceasing his systematic destruction of Calm, Quiet, and Items With Moveable Parts, to stare at dust floating in the sunlight, mesmerized, before dispensing, in an unearthly voice: "'Ooohhhh, moons."
Now Mr. Baby, your choices are harder in some ways, because your brain is singularly dedicated (at the cost of higher reasoning and sentimentality) to determining, with alarming accuracy and celerity, the contexts in which an expression like ''oh shit,'' would be both (in)appropriate and funny, but easier in others, because you live unencumbered by the constant, nagging fear that another human might be out there, right now, improperly clothed for cold weather or not eating enough vegetables. Nor does the maudlin resignation with which one bids a lifelong farewell to such shimmering things as dancing until three in the morning in a room full of bare-chested gay men while belting out New Order lyrics, haunt you.
What I'm saying is: we don't have to get all Sophie's Choice about whether we are sitting or not sitting on the floor. All I ask is that you limit yourself to the laws of physics as we understand them today, and accept that you cannot be in two places at one time, and you cannot have two superfun things at the same time, especially when one requires you to be naked, and the other requires that you wear clothes. And that, once they have been soaked in milk and thrown across the room and ingested by a dog, all the insistence in the world, however it may sound like the bleating of a very psychotic sheep, will not enable modern science to reconstitute the three pieces of cake that you also would like to eat peaceably, as you swore - you swore - you would do, nay, but five seconds ago.
It is, admittedly, hard to accept the perpetual dissatisfaction of life that comes with realizing that the innumerable adages about it apply not only to the rest of those poor schmucks, but to you as well. However, I think you can embrace these disappointments on your own scale, and come to understand that sometimes the paradoxes - of what we think we want and what we really want, and what we can really have, and what is actually, physically possible in this world - leave us only with the choice to accept that, in point of fact, one cannot have his cake, and cram it into his diapers, and throw it at the dog, and mash it into a fine paste to be smeared on the wall, and stick it up his nose, and drop it in tiny pieces into his sippy cup that someone has been foolishly convinced to ''[take the] top off [of],'' and eat it too.
Sometimes you do not feel like having your pants changed, because it (apparently) makes your head hurt, and you simultaneously have an extremely uncomfortable, or very large, pile of shit in your pants and would like someone to do something about it.
Sometimes you want to engage yourself in the task of filling a jar of water from the bathtub water into which the jar is overflowing, and you also want to watch Sesame Street, and you are disappointed even furtherly by the fact that you live in the house of people who followed their literary and musical hearts to the inevitable conclusion of poverty and there is no TV in the bathroom, which is explained to you in only the gentlest of cynical tones, and then, after arguing about it incomprehensibly for ten minutes, you decide you actually want to take a walk.
Sometimes you want to eat bread and stuff it in your sippy cup, and you don't want wet bread or, and I quote again, ''trash milk.''
Sometimes you want tomatoes, and then while they are being sliced, you seem to think you want pears, and then when they are on your plate, you want to scream ''May-nose! May-nose!'' and throw your pears all over the walls, because now you want tomatoes, but you might want the pears scraped off the wall and placed back on your plate so you can start screaming about tomatoes again.
Sometimes you want to sit on your potty, and then when taken there by the hand you get very upset, because you don't. And then when someone tells you, that's okay, you begin crying and yelling, ''potty potty potty!'' because you do want to sit on it. But you will also scream, no no no! and kick someone in the face because you don't.
And so this is when you have to make choices, and I know they are hard, but one does not get out of the crisis by alternating constantly and for seemingly unlimited periods of time between the two choices. And I see you are building yourself a cross over there, but let me just remind you that your father is Polish, and your mother is mostly Irish, and you have spent a grand total of 23 minutes in a Catholic church before being removed due to a lack of solemnity. We will double this amount because it was Easter, but still. You got nothing on us.
Anyway, you're in for a real ride if this is how you're going to be about it. As time marches indefatigably on, sometimes you might want to use your intellect, but will also want to spend your entire day engaged in the Sisyphean task of wiping up juice that didn't need to be poured all over the floor for the ninetieth time in 36 hours. You will want to purchase a package of gum of your own (and try to eat a piece of it, before bedtime, because, by contorting your neck and painstakingly, over a period twenty minutes and with one hand, unwrapping it and shoving it into your mouth after yelling, "Look, horsies!'' while passing an empty field, you are convinced that you can defeat the x-ray vision of a toddler in a car, which will pierce the seat and set off a stentorian alarm from the back that cannot be dismantled), but you will also want to purchase books whose spines are snapped ten minutes after they are opened and whose ''toddler-proof'' pages are promptly eaten to the intellectual betterment of no one, so you will be too poor to buy that gum. You will accept so many lies about whether or not pieces of food will be crammed into this or that crevice or orifice of this or that baby or dog, that you will remain in a confused fetal position at the end of the day, defeated, and you will want to read Moby Dick or do yoga like you had planned. With windswept hair, and a drink in your hand. But you will make choices. Choices that might seem misguided without the context: a small person wanders around your house, occasionally ceasing his systematic destruction of Calm, Quiet, and Items With Moveable Parts, to stare at dust floating in the sunlight, mesmerized, before dispensing, in an unearthly voice: "'Ooohhhh, moons."
Now Mr. Baby, your choices are harder in some ways, because your brain is singularly dedicated (at the cost of higher reasoning and sentimentality) to determining, with alarming accuracy and celerity, the contexts in which an expression like ''oh shit,'' would be both (in)appropriate and funny, but easier in others, because you live unencumbered by the constant, nagging fear that another human might be out there, right now, improperly clothed for cold weather or not eating enough vegetables. Nor does the maudlin resignation with which one bids a lifelong farewell to such shimmering things as dancing until three in the morning in a room full of bare-chested gay men while belting out New Order lyrics, haunt you.
What I'm saying is: we don't have to get all Sophie's Choice about whether we are sitting or not sitting on the floor. All I ask is that you limit yourself to the laws of physics as we understand them today, and accept that you cannot be in two places at one time, and you cannot have two superfun things at the same time, especially when one requires you to be naked, and the other requires that you wear clothes. And that, once they have been soaked in milk and thrown across the room and ingested by a dog, all the insistence in the world, however it may sound like the bleating of a very psychotic sheep, will not enable modern science to reconstitute the three pieces of cake that you also would like to eat peaceably, as you swore - you swore - you would do, nay, but five seconds ago.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The Potty Mystique, or Why Mommy Goes to The Bathroom. Without You.
Dear Mr. Baby:
It's not what you think. We have been talking a lot about the potty lately, which you enjoy as a topic of conversation but not a nexus of effort (although you seem very approving of the accomplishments of Bear and Grinchy, who always but always remember to tell me when they have to pee or poo). No, this is about the bathroom, itself, and what it represents. And why Mommy likes it so much. Without you.
It is probably your complicity in its creation that it escapes your notice: the rain of flashing lights and chorus of sound effects and snippets of cheery songs, the balls and blocks careening off the walls, the swishing toys and perpetually swinging baby swing (no matter. how. many. times. you. stop. it.), the hundreds of bright, maniacally-faced animals that could pop up at any moment and scream HELLO, the frenzied reaching and running and stretching to catch whatever it is that is falling or whomever it is that is consuming small mechanical parts or digging shit out of his pants or standing on the arm of the couch with his arms outstretched and a devious grin on his face. Or perhaps you do not mind living in what your father quite aptly dubbed ''the inside of a pinball machine." But some of us, Mr. Baby, are feeling just a little overwhelmed by all the video-gamesque urgency with which minor to moderate emergencies must be attended to at what is, however unlikely it may seem, always the other fucking side of the house. And the racket. The goddam racket.
Enter the bathroom, a place whose charms have perhaps escaped you. Yes, you have a fine appreciation of some things: The paper, quaintly wound about a cardboard tube, which can be spun rapidly so as to cover the floor in waves of luxurious white, and - glorious day! - which can also be turned to a lovely sludge by simply applying water. The tubes, pressed squarely in their soft abdomens, that dispense a minty, blue paste, which can be smeared upon the walls, or the floor, or your face, or even on Fred if he unsuspectingly wanders in there. A round bowl of water that can be made to spin and gurgle, and all the better, in which you can place objects and watch them whirl around, summoning hoards of screaming and frantic people to their rescue. Oh the swirling! The gushing! The splashing! The goop! The cast of exasperated characters! Yes, the bathroom is a fine place for a little chap.
But Mommy does not go to the bathroom for the toilet paper or the toothpaste, as appealing as these treasures are. Not to unroll things or to dump water on the floor or to squeeze conditioner bottles to make fart sounds, not to dismantle the precarious curtain situation nor to use everyone else's toothbrush for both a twisted pantomime of tooth brushing and of cleaning the floor. Mommy does not necessarily even go to the bathroom to use the oft-extolled potty. Mommy goes to the bathroom because the bathroom is drenched in the white noise of running sinks and whirring fans, and because for up to ten minutes, no one can legitimately ask Mommy to leave. Mommy goes to the bathroom just to be in the bathroom. To sit, and close her eyes, and pretend that she does not live in an arcade run by tiny people with no sense of volume nor concept of how annoying it is to do thirty-five loads of laundry a day - even if it is automated - simply because someone learned the words ''wet'' and ''new'' and ''shirt,'' and contrives a situation requiring their use every ten minutes.
It's quite difficult to suspend belief and absorb the magical qualities of the bathroom, if they are being thwarted from the inside or the outside by my excessively cheerful and enthusiastic guide for The New Reality, who rattles the door handle incessantly, turns the lights on and off, and narrates, with a minimalist bent, the minutia of the world outside the door (e.g.: Fred, wet, Fred, wet, Fred, wet, mama, siusiu, mama, siusiu, mama siusiu, no, Fred wet Fred mama siusiu, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off....)
Please don't worry, good buddy, you can catch me up in ten minutes. I'm coming back.
Because I love you.
And because the window is really too small to climb through.
It's not what you think. We have been talking a lot about the potty lately, which you enjoy as a topic of conversation but not a nexus of effort (although you seem very approving of the accomplishments of Bear and Grinchy, who always but always remember to tell me when they have to pee or poo). No, this is about the bathroom, itself, and what it represents. And why Mommy likes it so much. Without you.
It is probably your complicity in its creation that it escapes your notice: the rain of flashing lights and chorus of sound effects and snippets of cheery songs, the balls and blocks careening off the walls, the swishing toys and perpetually swinging baby swing (no matter. how. many. times. you. stop. it.), the hundreds of bright, maniacally-faced animals that could pop up at any moment and scream HELLO, the frenzied reaching and running and stretching to catch whatever it is that is falling or whomever it is that is consuming small mechanical parts or digging shit out of his pants or standing on the arm of the couch with his arms outstretched and a devious grin on his face. Or perhaps you do not mind living in what your father quite aptly dubbed ''the inside of a pinball machine." But some of us, Mr. Baby, are feeling just a little overwhelmed by all the video-gamesque urgency with which minor to moderate emergencies must be attended to at what is, however unlikely it may seem, always the other fucking side of the house. And the racket. The goddam racket.
Enter the bathroom, a place whose charms have perhaps escaped you. Yes, you have a fine appreciation of some things: The paper, quaintly wound about a cardboard tube, which can be spun rapidly so as to cover the floor in waves of luxurious white, and - glorious day! - which can also be turned to a lovely sludge by simply applying water. The tubes, pressed squarely in their soft abdomens, that dispense a minty, blue paste, which can be smeared upon the walls, or the floor, or your face, or even on Fred if he unsuspectingly wanders in there. A round bowl of water that can be made to spin and gurgle, and all the better, in which you can place objects and watch them whirl around, summoning hoards of screaming and frantic people to their rescue. Oh the swirling! The gushing! The splashing! The goop! The cast of exasperated characters! Yes, the bathroom is a fine place for a little chap.
But Mommy does not go to the bathroom for the toilet paper or the toothpaste, as appealing as these treasures are. Not to unroll things or to dump water on the floor or to squeeze conditioner bottles to make fart sounds, not to dismantle the precarious curtain situation nor to use everyone else's toothbrush for both a twisted pantomime of tooth brushing and of cleaning the floor. Mommy does not necessarily even go to the bathroom to use the oft-extolled potty. Mommy goes to the bathroom because the bathroom is drenched in the white noise of running sinks and whirring fans, and because for up to ten minutes, no one can legitimately ask Mommy to leave. Mommy goes to the bathroom just to be in the bathroom. To sit, and close her eyes, and pretend that she does not live in an arcade run by tiny people with no sense of volume nor concept of how annoying it is to do thirty-five loads of laundry a day - even if it is automated - simply because someone learned the words ''wet'' and ''new'' and ''shirt,'' and contrives a situation requiring their use every ten minutes.
It's quite difficult to suspend belief and absorb the magical qualities of the bathroom, if they are being thwarted from the inside or the outside by my excessively cheerful and enthusiastic guide for The New Reality, who rattles the door handle incessantly, turns the lights on and off, and narrates, with a minimalist bent, the minutia of the world outside the door (e.g.: Fred, wet, Fred, wet, Fred, wet, mama, siusiu, mama, siusiu, mama siusiu, no, Fred wet Fred mama siusiu, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off....)
Please don't worry, good buddy, you can catch me up in ten minutes. I'm coming back.
Because I love you.
And because the window is really too small to climb through.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
On Behalf of New Baby
Dear Mr. Baby:
There is, as you have noticed, a new baby in the house. No, that wasn't the result of the disasterous misreading of some kind of packaging, and no, we didn't realize it would be this fucking loud. It may seem idiotic now (let's have two small humans shitting all over the house so we can't get one other fucking thing done for two years), but it's all part of a brilliant long-term plan. One in which our lives are a living hell for a bit, but thereafter you tots amuse yourselves by lighting fireworks in small enclosures, or charging batteries with everyday metal objects you have around the house, or duct taping each other to the donkeys, or whatever it is boys are into these days, while mommy locks herself in a closet and has a martini. Back to the point: You seem to like him, and I have to say that for your deplorable lack of manners with adults, you are quite sweet to New Baby. He can't talk though, so there are just a few things he might say if he could. Just New Baby talking here, Mr. Baby. No embedded passive-aggressive messages from mommy pawned off in a high-pitched baby voice.
1) When I am crying, everyone can hear me just fine. So, big brother, you don't need to mimic the crying, or actually start crying even louder, or run around the house screaming ''BABY, SAD. Baby, sad. Baby waaa waaa!" (On a related note, it is also unnecessary to announce to the city of Toronto, thirty miles away, PHONE! when the phone rings or BEEP BEEP! when the microwave beeps, because the whole idea, Mr. Baby, of these things making a sound is so that no one else has to.)
2) It's pretty cool that you can identify all of my body parts. But, like mom keeps trying to tell you, it fucking hurts when someone shows where your eye is by sticking their pointer finger into it.
3) Sometimes, bro, I'm trying to take a nap. Just like you, I make a huge. theatrical, fuck-all deal out of sleeping. But then I actually do get sleepy, and go, as the book says, the fuck to sleep. Everyone in the house is really, really, really, really happy at this time. Loud noises are really, really, really bad at this time. So it's not helpful to choose that particular moment to look up from the quiet drawing activity that you were entranced by, so much that people forgot you were lurking about, and shriek "SZHLA! SZHLA! SZHLA! I DID IT!!!!!" while machine-gunning crayons all over the room like a psychopathic, AK-47-wielding Elmo.
4) The people of Fisher Price have determined a speed which, if it is not optimal, is at least a reasonable, for the swing to be swinging. No improvements, however enthusiastically attempted, can be made upon this.
5) Stop stealing my blanket. It is soft, but you've never, ever cared about that and are quite obviously just being a huge dick.
6) Thanks for having my back with the snacks, but for now I do not want to eat any pizza, Leggo sandwiches, or dime soup.
7) If you constantly push my soft skull inward, like a squeaky toy, some people are concerned that I will have a permanent dent in my head.
8) I am not a whiteboard.
9) And I'm told that no one wanted to resort to this kind of Grimmsian chicanery, but to pass on to you that: If you microwave tennis balls while mommy is feeding me, a bean stalk will grow out of your ears.
Sincerely,
New Baby
There is, as you have noticed, a new baby in the house. No, that wasn't the result of the disasterous misreading of some kind of packaging, and no, we didn't realize it would be this fucking loud. It may seem idiotic now (let's have two small humans shitting all over the house so we can't get one other fucking thing done for two years), but it's all part of a brilliant long-term plan. One in which our lives are a living hell for a bit, but thereafter you tots amuse yourselves by lighting fireworks in small enclosures, or charging batteries with everyday metal objects you have around the house, or duct taping each other to the donkeys, or whatever it is boys are into these days, while mommy locks herself in a closet and has a martini. Back to the point: You seem to like him, and I have to say that for your deplorable lack of manners with adults, you are quite sweet to New Baby. He can't talk though, so there are just a few things he might say if he could. Just New Baby talking here, Mr. Baby. No embedded passive-aggressive messages from mommy pawned off in a high-pitched baby voice.
1) When I am crying, everyone can hear me just fine. So, big brother, you don't need to mimic the crying, or actually start crying even louder, or run around the house screaming ''BABY, SAD. Baby, sad. Baby waaa waaa!" (On a related note, it is also unnecessary to announce to the city of Toronto, thirty miles away, PHONE! when the phone rings or BEEP BEEP! when the microwave beeps, because the whole idea, Mr. Baby, of these things making a sound is so that no one else has to.)
2) It's pretty cool that you can identify all of my body parts. But, like mom keeps trying to tell you, it fucking hurts when someone shows where your eye is by sticking their pointer finger into it.
3) Sometimes, bro, I'm trying to take a nap. Just like you, I make a huge. theatrical, fuck-all deal out of sleeping. But then I actually do get sleepy, and go, as the book says, the fuck to sleep. Everyone in the house is really, really, really, really happy at this time. Loud noises are really, really, really bad at this time. So it's not helpful to choose that particular moment to look up from the quiet drawing activity that you were entranced by, so much that people forgot you were lurking about, and shriek "SZHLA! SZHLA! SZHLA! I DID IT!!!!!" while machine-gunning crayons all over the room like a psychopathic, AK-47-wielding Elmo.
4) The people of Fisher Price have determined a speed which, if it is not optimal, is at least a reasonable, for the swing to be swinging. No improvements, however enthusiastically attempted, can be made upon this.
5) Stop stealing my blanket. It is soft, but you've never, ever cared about that and are quite obviously just being a huge dick.
6) Thanks for having my back with the snacks, but for now I do not want to eat any pizza, Leggo sandwiches, or dime soup.
7) If you constantly push my soft skull inward, like a squeaky toy, some people are concerned that I will have a permanent dent in my head.
8) I am not a whiteboard.
9) And I'm told that no one wanted to resort to this kind of Grimmsian chicanery, but to pass on to you that: If you microwave tennis balls while mommy is feeding me, a bean stalk will grow out of your ears.
Sincerely,
New Baby
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Take Me To Your Leader
Dear Mr. Baby:
I fully admit to not being, particularly when it comes to setting an example, the Cadillac of parents. The occasional colorful metaphor slips out, and I have a tendency to just reach over people for margarine rather than request politely that it be passed. I frequently sneeze without covering my nose, and to be perfectly honest I cannot explain why I do that. It's gross. But in the name of being a good parent and not having a total dick of a child, I exert a great deal of energy (a great deal, Mr. Baby, and we're already pretty tapped here), trying to lead by example, to be more refined than I actually am, to use a napkin and to say please and thank you and to conduct all the business of life with some degree of decorum. In my glorification of what are probably very commonplace manners, you may think of me as the Acura of mothers. I'm not the best, but if you follow my examples you can at least be seen at public and semi-fancy venues. In North America.
As such, I am almost 100% positive that you did not learn any of the subsequently discussed behaviors from me, or your dad, or even our canine companion, whose ill manners are to be excused based upon a lack of opposable thumbs.
So who, Mr. Baby, is the setter of examples in your life? Who continually covers comestibles in ketchup or jam or any artificially-colored, fructose-based substance, places them in his mouth to be churned like a used and clotted, day-old mouthwash, and then deposits them on the table? And then yells until the clump of saliva-sodden bread is re-covered in marmalade or maple syrup, to be re-inserted into the mouth to be churned again, removed of sugary coating, and redeposited on the table for, as you put it, "mo''' possibly forever?
I ask because I'd like to talk to this person, ask him why he is what he is, a creature with no regard for even the most basic tenets of human (or canine) decency, sculpting himself into a specimen of behaviour that extends beyond the boorish to the realm of barbaric. Why he has never heard of germ theory, or if he has, why he is so cavalier before its indisputable conclusions, cultivating, as he is, whatever lives on the floors and tables of the world, incubating disease and probably insects in the incessant ebb and flow of his carbohydrate-infused saliva. And why, most fascinating of all, he seems insensible to the texture of his food, to its quivering gelatinous semi-liquified shapelessness, shaking slightly on the table with the unheimlich inner inertia of jell-o. I want to ask him how he is not moved to a sick horror as he puts this substance back into his mouth, cooled as it is to the temperature of recent roadkill, or heated (if you prefer to think of it this way) to the damp, hospitalizing temperature of a potato salad left rotting in the swampy shade of a July picnic.
There's more.
While I cannot testify that I always dot my face daintily with a napkin to clear away the crumbs or dribble of the half-digested food eaten in lieu of my own lunch, I am certain I have never combed my hair with a fork, using scrambled eggs as conditioner. Nor have I used an overturned bowl of tuna casserole as a hat. And I sometimes tire of your stories and listen only partially, so I cannot claim to be the greatest of listeners, but I am confident that I never wait patiently, sometimes feigning introspection, until others in the room - joined as they are in holy matrimony and desiring to speak to each other, if not about love then at least about whether the proof of insurance is in the car or not - open their mouths. And then, only then, begin to emit a string of deafening nonsense syllables, the din of which obliterates not only the possibility of transmitting information between these two people, but also, in their souls, the desire to ever begin speaking again. I cannot testify to excusing myself politely on a consistent basis when requesting that Fred extract himself from his lazy, rug-like positioning in the major throughfares of our home, but I am positive that I do not go around seeking people sitting comfortably in a chair and push them out of it, smiling and saying sweetly, ''sit, sit,'' but actually just being a huge asshole and taking everyone's seat.
Take me to this person, this leader of small men, so that I may discuss these less-than-exemplary examples being set clandestinely in my home, and perhaps pay him off to behave like a human. Because I'm not above bribery anymore. And you're becoming a bit of a ruffian, Mr. Baby. Just a bit.
I fully admit to not being, particularly when it comes to setting an example, the Cadillac of parents. The occasional colorful metaphor slips out, and I have a tendency to just reach over people for margarine rather than request politely that it be passed. I frequently sneeze without covering my nose, and to be perfectly honest I cannot explain why I do that. It's gross. But in the name of being a good parent and not having a total dick of a child, I exert a great deal of energy (a great deal, Mr. Baby, and we're already pretty tapped here), trying to lead by example, to be more refined than I actually am, to use a napkin and to say please and thank you and to conduct all the business of life with some degree of decorum. In my glorification of what are probably very commonplace manners, you may think of me as the Acura of mothers. I'm not the best, but if you follow my examples you can at least be seen at public and semi-fancy venues. In North America.
As such, I am almost 100% positive that you did not learn any of the subsequently discussed behaviors from me, or your dad, or even our canine companion, whose ill manners are to be excused based upon a lack of opposable thumbs.
So who, Mr. Baby, is the setter of examples in your life? Who continually covers comestibles in ketchup or jam or any artificially-colored, fructose-based substance, places them in his mouth to be churned like a used and clotted, day-old mouthwash, and then deposits them on the table? And then yells until the clump of saliva-sodden bread is re-covered in marmalade or maple syrup, to be re-inserted into the mouth to be churned again, removed of sugary coating, and redeposited on the table for, as you put it, "mo''' possibly forever?
I ask because I'd like to talk to this person, ask him why he is what he is, a creature with no regard for even the most basic tenets of human (or canine) decency, sculpting himself into a specimen of behaviour that extends beyond the boorish to the realm of barbaric. Why he has never heard of germ theory, or if he has, why he is so cavalier before its indisputable conclusions, cultivating, as he is, whatever lives on the floors and tables of the world, incubating disease and probably insects in the incessant ebb and flow of his carbohydrate-infused saliva. And why, most fascinating of all, he seems insensible to the texture of his food, to its quivering gelatinous semi-liquified shapelessness, shaking slightly on the table with the unheimlich inner inertia of jell-o. I want to ask him how he is not moved to a sick horror as he puts this substance back into his mouth, cooled as it is to the temperature of recent roadkill, or heated (if you prefer to think of it this way) to the damp, hospitalizing temperature of a potato salad left rotting in the swampy shade of a July picnic.
There's more.
While I cannot testify that I always dot my face daintily with a napkin to clear away the crumbs or dribble of the half-digested food eaten in lieu of my own lunch, I am certain I have never combed my hair with a fork, using scrambled eggs as conditioner. Nor have I used an overturned bowl of tuna casserole as a hat. And I sometimes tire of your stories and listen only partially, so I cannot claim to be the greatest of listeners, but I am confident that I never wait patiently, sometimes feigning introspection, until others in the room - joined as they are in holy matrimony and desiring to speak to each other, if not about love then at least about whether the proof of insurance is in the car or not - open their mouths. And then, only then, begin to emit a string of deafening nonsense syllables, the din of which obliterates not only the possibility of transmitting information between these two people, but also, in their souls, the desire to ever begin speaking again. I cannot testify to excusing myself politely on a consistent basis when requesting that Fred extract himself from his lazy, rug-like positioning in the major throughfares of our home, but I am positive that I do not go around seeking people sitting comfortably in a chair and push them out of it, smiling and saying sweetly, ''sit, sit,'' but actually just being a huge asshole and taking everyone's seat.
Take me to this person, this leader of small men, so that I may discuss these less-than-exemplary examples being set clandestinely in my home, and perhaps pay him off to behave like a human. Because I'm not above bribery anymore. And you're becoming a bit of a ruffian, Mr. Baby. Just a bit.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Some issues in semantics
Dear Mr. Baby:
Well-versed as I may be in the broad strokes of language acquisition, indicating no need for intervention on my part, as your dense and terrifying, disproportionately giant brain is hard at work at the mysteries of language all on its own - I still have a few notes for you here. It would just be easier if you would accept my conclusions about them, sooner rather than later. I've been at this English block party a long time now, and you can trust me with matters of semantic import. Also, there's Mommy's Sanity to think about. There's that.
So here are just a few entries in your current lexicon that could use a little fine-tuning:
Hot: Currently being used as an adjective for all items deviating greater than +/- 1 degree (F) from room temperature. Also apparently fused in your mind with the meaning of apocalyptically lethal. Naturally, this is the spawn of the seemingly innocuous seed that was planted by the explanation of why you can't touch the oven, which is still good and true. But look, little dude: some of this crap is cold, to start with. Also, I propose, in the name of All That Is Holy and Remotely Sane, to expand the temperature range a little. Say to include things ranging from 50-85 degrees as acceptable to touch without blowing on them for twenty minutes or screaming like someone just severed your hand with a jackknife and is still sawing away at it like a salami.
Ew: Also a little too all-encompassing. What was once applied to things that were, generally speaking, gross: dog shit, cow shit, goose shit, and baby shit, you are now walking around the farm declaring everything Ew. This can be a little insulting, if you are pointing at my face or making a commentary on the cleanliness of our house. And honestly: if something is covered in yogurt and snot and mashed into a crevice somewhere, that is Ew, but it's sort of bitchy to be complaining about it when everyone knows perfectly well that the only person who would cover a napkin and some fries in yogurt, chew on them, take them out of their mouth and wipe their nose with them, and then stuff them in between the drawers from whence they cannot be removed, is you.
Ow: Meant to be said when you have an injury or physical pain. The existential crisis you have about whether or not you should have your pants checked before your nap, and whether not 'tis better to sleep for a couple of hours or to take arms and struggle, or really just any psychological discomfort brought on by someone requesting that you do something you think you might prefer not to - that is not ow. People think I'm punching you, so cut it out.
Baby: You were a little young to be introducing the idea that the new baby is in mommy's belly, and that's my bad. So, while you seem to have grasped baby in its usual meaning, you'\ve also expanded it to include everyone's tummy. This makes for some hilarity when huge beer-drinking men say, ''What's this?'' Women, however...look kid, women are just going to be a different story in general than that of burly men with beer-bellies. Dad will tell you the rest of these important facts, but typically, women don't appreciate you patting their bellies and saying baby. Especially not at the yuppy grocery store, especially not if they're wearing yoga pants and have blonde streaky hair or drive a Lexus. Plus, I think we let somebody's cat accidentally out of the bag, judging by the terse expressions and subsequent whispering that ensued the other day at the store post-baby declaration. So maybe just keep your hands off the bellies of young and quite presumably unmarried women, and please, if you can't do that, for the love of god, don't smile and say baby, baby as you're doing it.
Fall: It's important to recognize that fall is generally used for sudden downward descents of an unintentional nature. This last part is very central to the meaning of the word. So when you say, ''Fall,'' because you were running through the house and (heh, heh) tripped on your own damn Leggo block, that's a pretty accurate story. Looking down from your highchair at the pile of spaghetti and milk on Fred's head and commenting ''all fall,'' however, is a little less accurate, given that you just decided to toss it there. See the difference? Throw is the word you are looking for. Or jackass.
Finally, good buddy, I'm really proud of you being bilingual, and finally rocking some Polish vocab. The fact that it means ''gimme'' is....well, it is what it is. Battles for another day. It's just that daj!, when you yell it in a demonic voice with that overly-determined expression on your face, sounds a lot like ''DIE. DIIIEEEEEEE!'' to the Anglophones. Maybe just stop spinning your head in circles while you say it.
Well-versed as I may be in the broad strokes of language acquisition, indicating no need for intervention on my part, as your dense and terrifying, disproportionately giant brain is hard at work at the mysteries of language all on its own - I still have a few notes for you here. It would just be easier if you would accept my conclusions about them, sooner rather than later. I've been at this English block party a long time now, and you can trust me with matters of semantic import. Also, there's Mommy's Sanity to think about. There's that.
So here are just a few entries in your current lexicon that could use a little fine-tuning:
Hot: Currently being used as an adjective for all items deviating greater than +/- 1 degree (F) from room temperature. Also apparently fused in your mind with the meaning of apocalyptically lethal. Naturally, this is the spawn of the seemingly innocuous seed that was planted by the explanation of why you can't touch the oven, which is still good and true. But look, little dude: some of this crap is cold, to start with. Also, I propose, in the name of All That Is Holy and Remotely Sane, to expand the temperature range a little. Say to include things ranging from 50-85 degrees as acceptable to touch without blowing on them for twenty minutes or screaming like someone just severed your hand with a jackknife and is still sawing away at it like a salami.
Ew: Also a little too all-encompassing. What was once applied to things that were, generally speaking, gross: dog shit, cow shit, goose shit, and baby shit, you are now walking around the farm declaring everything Ew. This can be a little insulting, if you are pointing at my face or making a commentary on the cleanliness of our house. And honestly: if something is covered in yogurt and snot and mashed into a crevice somewhere, that is Ew, but it's sort of bitchy to be complaining about it when everyone knows perfectly well that the only person who would cover a napkin and some fries in yogurt, chew on them, take them out of their mouth and wipe their nose with them, and then stuff them in between the drawers from whence they cannot be removed, is you.
Ow: Meant to be said when you have an injury or physical pain. The existential crisis you have about whether or not you should have your pants checked before your nap, and whether not 'tis better to sleep for a couple of hours or to take arms and struggle, or really just any psychological discomfort brought on by someone requesting that you do something you think you might prefer not to - that is not ow. People think I'm punching you, so cut it out.
Baby: You were a little young to be introducing the idea that the new baby is in mommy's belly, and that's my bad. So, while you seem to have grasped baby in its usual meaning, you'\ve also expanded it to include everyone's tummy. This makes for some hilarity when huge beer-drinking men say, ''What's this?'' Women, however...look kid, women are just going to be a different story in general than that of burly men with beer-bellies. Dad will tell you the rest of these important facts, but typically, women don't appreciate you patting their bellies and saying baby. Especially not at the yuppy grocery store, especially not if they're wearing yoga pants and have blonde streaky hair or drive a Lexus. Plus, I think we let somebody's cat accidentally out of the bag, judging by the terse expressions and subsequent whispering that ensued the other day at the store post-baby declaration. So maybe just keep your hands off the bellies of young and quite presumably unmarried women, and please, if you can't do that, for the love of god, don't smile and say baby, baby as you're doing it.
Fall: It's important to recognize that fall is generally used for sudden downward descents of an unintentional nature. This last part is very central to the meaning of the word. So when you say, ''Fall,'' because you were running through the house and (heh, heh) tripped on your own damn Leggo block, that's a pretty accurate story. Looking down from your highchair at the pile of spaghetti and milk on Fred's head and commenting ''all fall,'' however, is a little less accurate, given that you just decided to toss it there. See the difference? Throw is the word you are looking for. Or jackass.
Finally, good buddy, I'm really proud of you being bilingual, and finally rocking some Polish vocab. The fact that it means ''gimme'' is....well, it is what it is. Battles for another day. It's just that daj!, when you yell it in a demonic voice with that overly-determined expression on your face, sounds a lot like ''DIE. DIIIEEEEEEE!'' to the Anglophones. Maybe just stop spinning your head in circles while you say it.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Yet Fresher Auditory Hell
Hello there, Mr. Baby:
It's been a while. As you are aware, we have been quite busy you and I. You, pondering the multifarious mysteries of the universe, and I cleaning up the aftermath of your robust and maladroit methodologies. I haven't, really, any time to write letters of complaint - not if we're going to keep at bay the relentless tides of excruciatingly sharp-edged Leggo blocks, scraps of potentially once-important papers, cleverly smuggled rocks (selected, with apparent care, from the heaps of dry and clean stones for their high degree of mud and shit content), fistfuls of mashed and partially digested bread products, abused and beloved recycling items, bears, blankets, and those lovely cubes that intermittently dispense in perpetuum the cheerfuckingest arrangements of segments of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ever imagined. All of which you are employing in what seems to me to be quite a haphazard and unsystematic set of experiments centering around our good friend gravity. (Again). To be honest, I haven't minded terribly being relegated to the less-than-glamorous role of lab janitor, because there are moments - beautiful and ephemeral moments - in which you actually entertain yourself.
However, you occasionally hit a snag. An item shaped like a star, to your angry befuddlement, will not allow itself to be crammed into a hole shaped like an octagon. Your bears are fat and tall and will not, despite your best efforts, be confined to the space into which you have smashed a number of other tiny items without problems. A car, overturned and pummeled into a tractor, cannot be removed with the same ease as it was earlier when it was on wheels. Your sippy cup straw sometimes comes unplugged.
Gone are the days of screaming, of more screaming, of horrible sounds, and of the ambiguous and adamant NO. No, from the apparently fathomless well of abrasive sounds you have extracted yet another menace to our sanity, another vicious assault on poise and composure.
Literature on the subject suggests that this sound be met with calm and silence. Demonstrate, the experts say, that you are in control by not reacting to your toddler.
Okay, but:...I'd like to know this: have any of these assholes actually heard this fucking sound?
In attempting to describe this, I am rendered helpless yet again by the exquisite hellishness of your sensory production. Words fail us again, Mr Baby. I suppose it's as if someone boiled together the auditory essence of: a crow being tortured in the throat of a seagull, of a cat being slowly flayed by dragging it across a chalkboard, of all the hypersensitive fire alarms in the middle of all the nights, of bagpipes played by tone-deaf amateurs, and, for good measure, even more tortured animals - all of the peacocks and cats who were ever shredded by predators or accidentally set on fire - and distilled them into one incomprehensibly potent sound, yet still I think this description does it no justice.
The Whine.
The Whine can permeate all things. I feel certain my blood is actually curdled by the deranged and impossible frequency at which it resonates. It is impossible to do anything, and impossible to not do anything, when the Whine is being broadcast. (Science backs me up here). And as you stand there, holding your truck upside down and at arms length, a Leggo block (a seemingly innocuous item but actually the harbinger of an auditory apocalypse) trapped in the driver's cabin, your face contorted into the almost comical but mostly terrifying expression required to birth this awful noise, I have but one thought in the milliseconds of silence that precede the Whine. And that is this:
There has got to be a way to weaponize this shit.
It's been a while. As you are aware, we have been quite busy you and I. You, pondering the multifarious mysteries of the universe, and I cleaning up the aftermath of your robust and maladroit methodologies. I haven't, really, any time to write letters of complaint - not if we're going to keep at bay the relentless tides of excruciatingly sharp-edged Leggo blocks, scraps of potentially once-important papers, cleverly smuggled rocks (selected, with apparent care, from the heaps of dry and clean stones for their high degree of mud and shit content), fistfuls of mashed and partially digested bread products, abused and beloved recycling items, bears, blankets, and those lovely cubes that intermittently dispense in perpetuum the cheerfuckingest arrangements of segments of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ever imagined. All of which you are employing in what seems to me to be quite a haphazard and unsystematic set of experiments centering around our good friend gravity. (Again). To be honest, I haven't minded terribly being relegated to the less-than-glamorous role of lab janitor, because there are moments - beautiful and ephemeral moments - in which you actually entertain yourself.
However, you occasionally hit a snag. An item shaped like a star, to your angry befuddlement, will not allow itself to be crammed into a hole shaped like an octagon. Your bears are fat and tall and will not, despite your best efforts, be confined to the space into which you have smashed a number of other tiny items without problems. A car, overturned and pummeled into a tractor, cannot be removed with the same ease as it was earlier when it was on wheels. Your sippy cup straw sometimes comes unplugged.
Gone are the days of screaming, of more screaming, of horrible sounds, and of the ambiguous and adamant NO. No, from the apparently fathomless well of abrasive sounds you have extracted yet another menace to our sanity, another vicious assault on poise and composure.
Literature on the subject suggests that this sound be met with calm and silence. Demonstrate, the experts say, that you are in control by not reacting to your toddler.
Okay, but:...I'd like to know this: have any of these assholes actually heard this fucking sound?
In attempting to describe this, I am rendered helpless yet again by the exquisite hellishness of your sensory production. Words fail us again, Mr Baby. I suppose it's as if someone boiled together the auditory essence of: a crow being tortured in the throat of a seagull, of a cat being slowly flayed by dragging it across a chalkboard, of all the hypersensitive fire alarms in the middle of all the nights, of bagpipes played by tone-deaf amateurs, and, for good measure, even more tortured animals - all of the peacocks and cats who were ever shredded by predators or accidentally set on fire - and distilled them into one incomprehensibly potent sound, yet still I think this description does it no justice.
The Whine.
The Whine can permeate all things. I feel certain my blood is actually curdled by the deranged and impossible frequency at which it resonates. It is impossible to do anything, and impossible to not do anything, when the Whine is being broadcast. (Science backs me up here). And as you stand there, holding your truck upside down and at arms length, a Leggo block (a seemingly innocuous item but actually the harbinger of an auditory apocalypse) trapped in the driver's cabin, your face contorted into the almost comical but mostly terrifying expression required to birth this awful noise, I have but one thought in the milliseconds of silence that precede the Whine. And that is this:
There has got to be a way to weaponize this shit.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Mr. No
Dear Mr. Baby:
Or should I say.....Mr. No? Like all of the words and ideas that seem to spontaneously generate in your mind while you sleep, like shi-ta ta, Fred, the inexplicably Jersey-accented bear, and socks (a robust and...eccentric vocabulary that can only hint at the genius within), you awoke one morning to declare that sometime while you were sleeping, you decided to find everything objectionable. Or perhaps you always did, but only just recently found the means to express your general disdain for It All.
Once again, we must applaud Selma Fraiberg for her attempt to paint a charming picture of the delightful toddler, sweetly and excitedly taking on his new world and cognitive abilities with charm and pluck. Children at this age, she advises, may adopt the word ''no'' as their favorite word, but we can all rest assured that they are simply declaring their intent to possibly veto something, if they should possibly decide to do so.
And when you read the book, you picture this adorable little bobble-head toddling around, saying no but still doing what you ask him to, in a sunny kitchen full of smiling people. And possibly those bluebirds from Snow White.
Whatever. You, Mr. Baby, do not only intend to possibly veto it, you do definitely veto it, and refuse to do it, whatever it is, until, in a mercurial and mysterious twist, you veto your own veto and decide that you don't like not doing the thing that you professed such an objection to doing in the first place, so not only will you not not do it, you're not doing that, either. Or anything else that is proposed, or nothing that isn't, or for that matter, any additional proposals or non-proposals, thoughts of proposals, or considerations of same.
So what are we doing, Mr. Baby? Who. the. fuck. knows?
And then there is.... The Tone. You are as dismissive as any high-powered Wall Street executive. No, you tell me, before my sentence is even finished, ending your declaration with pursed and resolute lips. You don't have time for this, you are saying. It's completely out of the question. It's almost a half-no, like you can't even dignify the suggestion with a reply. You can't afford the time to pronounce the entire vowel, the idea is so absurd and draining of your time.
It's a bit flippant, Mr. Baby.
And so here we are, a typical day:
Uh-oh, you dropped your milk on the floor.
No.
Do you want me to pick it up?
No.
Okay fine.
No.
So you want it?
No.
Do you want to get down?
No.
Do you want some more snacks?
No.
What do you want?
No.
Nothing?
No.
Okay then.
No.
I've had more realistic conversations with a chatbot, A.
No.
(Silence)
(Stare)
(Silence)
No.
Want to play-
No.
You're shoving a book in my hand-
No.
You want me to read it?
No.
(Silence)
(Shoving book in hand) No.
Okay fine. "Five little ducks-''
(Taking book and throwing it on the floor) No.
Okay, no book.
No.
Are you agreeing with me?
No. (Shoving book in hand).
Read -
No.
(Opening book)
(Taking book and shaking head)No.
So no-
No.
So I-
No.
(Silence)
No.
Sigh.
(Throwing book at head)No.
And don't think, Mr. Baby, that any of this is more charming just because you call your bathtub Babycakes.
Or should I say.....Mr. No? Like all of the words and ideas that seem to spontaneously generate in your mind while you sleep, like shi-ta ta, Fred, the inexplicably Jersey-accented bear, and socks (a robust and...eccentric vocabulary that can only hint at the genius within), you awoke one morning to declare that sometime while you were sleeping, you decided to find everything objectionable. Or perhaps you always did, but only just recently found the means to express your general disdain for It All.
Once again, we must applaud Selma Fraiberg for her attempt to paint a charming picture of the delightful toddler, sweetly and excitedly taking on his new world and cognitive abilities with charm and pluck. Children at this age, she advises, may adopt the word ''no'' as their favorite word, but we can all rest assured that they are simply declaring their intent to possibly veto something, if they should possibly decide to do so.
And when you read the book, you picture this adorable little bobble-head toddling around, saying no but still doing what you ask him to, in a sunny kitchen full of smiling people. And possibly those bluebirds from Snow White.
Whatever. You, Mr. Baby, do not only intend to possibly veto it, you do definitely veto it, and refuse to do it, whatever it is, until, in a mercurial and mysterious twist, you veto your own veto and decide that you don't like not doing the thing that you professed such an objection to doing in the first place, so not only will you not not do it, you're not doing that, either. Or anything else that is proposed, or nothing that isn't, or for that matter, any additional proposals or non-proposals, thoughts of proposals, or considerations of same.
So what are we doing, Mr. Baby? Who. the. fuck. knows?
And then there is.... The Tone. You are as dismissive as any high-powered Wall Street executive. No, you tell me, before my sentence is even finished, ending your declaration with pursed and resolute lips. You don't have time for this, you are saying. It's completely out of the question. It's almost a half-no, like you can't even dignify the suggestion with a reply. You can't afford the time to pronounce the entire vowel, the idea is so absurd and draining of your time.
It's a bit flippant, Mr. Baby.
And so here we are, a typical day:
Uh-oh, you dropped your milk on the floor.
No.
Do you want me to pick it up?
No.
Okay fine.
No.
So you want it?
No.
Do you want to get down?
No.
Do you want some more snacks?
No.
What do you want?
No.
Nothing?
No.
Okay then.
No.
I've had more realistic conversations with a chatbot, A.
No.
(Silence)
(Stare)
(Silence)
No.
Want to play-
No.
You're shoving a book in my hand-
No.
You want me to read it?
No.
(Silence)
(Shoving book in hand) No.
Okay fine. "Five little ducks-''
(Taking book and throwing it on the floor) No.
Okay, no book.
No.
Are you agreeing with me?
No. (Shoving book in hand).
Read -
No.
(Opening book)
(Taking book and shaking head)No.
So no-
No.
So I-
No.
(Silence)
No.
Sigh.
(Throwing book at head)No.
And don't think, Mr. Baby, that any of this is more charming just because you call your bathtub Babycakes.
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