Erik's Blog

Nora, for these first ten months, you have always been sort of lazy, choosing the path that involves the least amount of work. When it was time for you to breast feed, you opted to have the milk extracted for you and, first syringed drop by drop into your mouth, and eventually placed in a bottle. At the moment you’re at least a month behind your contemporaries (our friends’ early 2009 babies) in the area of locomotion. It probably hasn’t helped your progress that you have never liked being on your stomach. Especially ever since you learned to roll over, we barely even have time to snap back-fastening your pajamas closed sometimes.

In my search to rationalize your shortcomings, I’ve come up with a theory:
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For pretty much all of December my wife’s family has been pressuring us to leave Nora with them for Santo Tomás (December 22), a huge festival in their town of Mondragon involving special seasonal foods, getting dressed up in traditional Basque clothing, traditional Basque music and dancing, and a crafts and livestock market. The main reason they wanted her was to dress her up in some traditional Basque clothes. Some part of our human brain finds it incredibly adorable to dress up a small child (or chimpanzee) in clothes we associate more with adult humans.
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During their visit, my parents very much enjoyed feeding their granddaughter her lunchtime vegetable puree and her afternoon fruit. Feeding Nora is one of the best times (both frustrating and adorable) I usually get to spend with her, and I delighted in the opportunity to share the experience with my folks. In my couple months of feeding her from a spoon, have found that it is pretty much impossible to feed her without opening your mouth big when you want her to do the same. It’s a natural human reflex. The fact that she has not yet reached the point where she can mimic the body movements of someone else does not stop us (me, my wife, my parents, and everyone I’ve seen feed her) from trying to will her mouth open with our own gaping jaw. It’s quite a funny phenomenon.
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This morning when Nora got up, I fed her breakfast and set her on the couch while I went about organizing a few things around the house. I left the room for about two minutes, and when I returned, there she was, in the same place I’d left her, with both the television and cable box remotes in her lap, watching some Spanish political pundit on the news. The television had been off when I left.
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The word “regular” is spelled, means, and is more or less pronounced the same in Spanish and English. In Spain – in my Spanish family, at least – it is the worst possible response that can be given when someone asks you how you’re doing, guaranteed to get a, “Aw, what’s wrong?” in return. Of course it’s funny to me because if you got that response from an English speaker, they’d be referring to their regular bowel schedule.

After one night of pure hell last week we have had a resounding success in our nocturnal parental negotiations. The key, it seems, is keeping a regular schedule and sticking to it no matter what.
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Nora’s academic career is off to a pretty dismal start. She got her first report card from daycare. Imagine the disappointment on her parents’ faces to see that she’s getting an F in Sitting. Her daycare attendant informed us that, for her age, she severely lacks the muscle tone needed to maintain herself in a seated position. She said that she placed Nora in a walker, and Nora pretty much just slumped over. The attendant gave us a book about exercises that we need to be doing with Nora and told us how to practice with her. Needless to say, we were pretty shocked and devastated. But, like good parents, we set her up a strict regimen of regular beatings homework time to practice.
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It’s weird, the songs we sing to our children. When a song is needed to get a baby through a stressful time or maneuver, the parent often doesn’t have time to specifically choose a song for the occasion, the brain is just told to sing, and sing it does.

Recently my brain and I been going through a John Williams phase. I love John Williams’ music. If Beethoven or Bach or the Strauss boys were alive today they’d be scoring movies, too. Different songs come out of me at different times depending on the current parenting operation. When I have to flip her onto her stomach as part of a donning or doffing, the Superman theme comes out as she naturally resembles a flying prone human.
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The first thing Spaniards notice about Nora is the color of her eyes, as only a very small percentage of the Spanish population has blue eyes. Unfortunately, this means she is also very sensitive to direct sunlight.¹ When we go outside and sunlight hits her face, she squirms and cries. I feel her pain. A larger-than-I’d-like-to-think-about percentage of my childhood group photos with classes and sports teams features my scrunched up squinting face.

We consulted the doctor on when it’s appropriate to buy a kid some sunglasses. She told us that six months was awfully young, but that if you wait until ten months, it’ll be hard to keep them on. Meaning that when a kid is older, they are more aware of how they are used to being outdoors and will dislike the change, but if you sneak them in early and they get accustomed to wearing them, then it’s easier later on. So the other day I bought Nora some sunglasses…and I must say, when we put them on her, she’s one cool cat.
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Nora, we’ve recorded the size of your hands and foot again in a clay keepsake. Recently my parents sent us a new shipment of clay keepsake kits. You requested that one of them be sent to your friend, Matteo, in Brussels, and we kept the other two. Since we used one when you were three months old, we thought it would be nice to do one at six, nine, and twelve months as well. Luckily the package arrived during your six month birthday party. That weekend, we sat down to knead some clay…
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I do have to admit that feeding Nora vegetable puree is actually kind of fun. After the first feeding, I realized, “So this is what bibs are for!” After the second day, it occurred to me to ditch the bib, as the shirt underneath always got stained anyway, and why wash two items when you can only wash one? A feeding session seemed like the perfect occasion for a timelapse video. So here we go…
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