Petit Lapin au Chocolat

The mind of an infant

It may be a cliche, but observing Lily learn and develop is the most fascinating and amazing thing I've ever done. It's fascinating when I show her a picture of a cow, and I say, "C'est une vache," and then later I say, "Ou est la vache?" and she points to the cow, that she still has no idea what a cow is about. When she actually sees a cow, she will be blown away, because at present she thinks cows are oh, about 5" x 7". Sometimes they're flat and shiny and black and white and munching vibrant green grass and you can make them disappear by turning to the goat page, and sometimes they're 3D and fuzzy and brown and hang out in the barn with the fuzzy brown horse and the fuzzy white sheep. But they're still smaller than a breadbox. To her, bunnies and horses and goats and crocodiles and ducklings are about the same size.

And donkeys talk.

The joke's on me.

Thanks for all the well wishes both on- and offline for Lily's return to nonvomiting. I was going to update today, and thought, wow, it's been a long time since she had that little bug, and what do you know, after lunch today I picked her up and she heaved once and then projectile vomited all over the kitchen (it ain't that hard to get all the surface area of our kitchen, believe me). I don't know why I am always the one holding her when she vomits. I'm going to chalk it up to her feeling secure enough in my arms to let fly.

What I really wanted to share today is, The joke's on me. I'm a real linguaphile and I've been reading and singing to Lily in French since before she was born. Lily loves her French songs, and she stops and laughs and smiles when I sing them to her. Often it's the only thing that will stop the crying when she's hating a diaper change or protesting a subway ride. I have spoken French exclusively to her from birth, and when it came time to do more work than I could do in the 20 minutes a day she was napping, I hired a Chinese woman to play with her and speak Mandarin to her about 14 hours a week. The result is beautiful - Lily understands everything we say to her in French and in Mandarin, and she has quite a few words in both languages at 15 months.

So imagine my chagrin when I hear my daughter singing a song, the very first she has ever attempted to sing, and it is... Old Macdonald. Not Sur le pont d'Avignon or Pomme de Reinette or even Alouette, but everywhere a quack quack. Oh, she delights in bellowing out E-I-E-I-Oooooooo! MOO MOO MOOO! or alternatively, BAA BAA BAA! The weird part is, no one sings Old Macdonald to her! Her babysitter may have sung it to her once or twice before. My point is, some higher power is making some serious fun of me.

I am of course thrilled that she is singing. And I don't care if she says cockadoodledoo or cocorico. As long as she never, ever, calls a tart a quiche (you know who you are).

Heave, ho!

I’ve been meaning to update, but I’ve been sick, and now Lily has a stomach bug. She has been projectile vomiting since yesterday. Between bouts of hurling, she seems perfectly normal, and this deceived us enough yesterday evening (hours after she hurled for the first time and we chalked it up to overeating) to follow through with plans to have dinner at Maggie Brown with a friend and her 15-month-old. We were all sitting there in the warm light, merrily chatting and clinking glasses, thrilled that the girls were behaving themselves so brilliantly, when Lily opened her mouth and vomit shot straight out, Exorcist-style, onto the table. My quick Vomit-flex™ allowed me to deflect the puke from my barely eaten $16 entree, though of course at this point the meal was over. After taking off my new-ish sweater and mopping the excess vomit from my daughter, who was screaming in horror, I held her against me until she calmed down, then bundled her up, eased her into the sling, and headed for home, puke still dripping from us both. My partner stayed and took care of the check (and probably finished my beer, the fink).

So today, she ate breakfast and lunch and was totally fine, dancing, laughing, doing tricks on her Radio Flyer Tiny Trike as usual. Bug over, right? At dinner she wouldn't eat much and refused even her favorite foods, but knocked back a ton of soy-hemp milk and drank a bunch of water. Afterward, when we had gone through most of our bedtime routine – said goodnight to Papa, gotten into pajamas, said goodnight to all the stuffed animals, read a few bedtime stories – she turned around and straddled my lap to start nursing, then unleashed about a gallon of vomit on me and my great-grandmother's upholstered rocking chair. (I've been looking for an excuse to re-cover that chair, and this appears to be legit.) It wasn’t pretty: After she was hauled off, howling piteously, to the bathroom, I looked down at my bra-tank combo to see a glistening pool of vomit lapping gently like gulf-shore waves at my cleavage.

Ah, the joys of motherhood. It’s fascinating to see what I can/will do that I never thought I could/would. These things include eating food that has been chewed and spit out, tasting a finger-full of (nontoxic) paint when Lily had sucked on the end of a loaded paintbrush at playgroup, picking another human being’s nose/ears, examining the contents of a diaper and removing suspect items for a closer look, and now hurrying to embrace someone who is soaked in vomit. We won’t even go into nursing every 1-2 hours all night long for almost 14 months, holding her a certain way for more than an hour every day while my arm muscles were cramping and having spasms so that she got enough sleep at naptime, and all the other “normal” things that mamas (and papas) do. No, we won’t go into all of that.

And now that she sleeps I, too, must… sleep…