The Dog Is Back
It's 9pm. I hear some vigorous crying coming from A's room. This is unusual these days, so I go in to investigate. She's such a great communicator that I know she'll tell me exactly what the problem is, and she does.
"Barking, the barking, the barking!" At first I can't understand because of the damn binky, but I pull that out of her mouth and it becomes clear. The dog next door was barking and it woke her up.
I don't know why that dog is out, why he's barking or why it woke her up this time, of all the times he randomly barks, but I don't like it. I imagined myself marching over to the dog's people and asking them to get control of things and stop waking up my child. But I did nothing like that. I just held her and told her things were ok. She went back to sleep easy enough.
But I tell you, if this summer is going to be like last summer, with all the dog romping around and barking after bedtime, I might have to have a friendly chat with the neighbors. That's just not cool.
Big Dead Man
We were all sitting on the couch today, talking and having a good time. All of a sudden, A points at the fireplace and says, "I see big man."
Uh, what? What big man? Because of my own experience as a kid, I immediately wonder, is she seeing a man there where we don't? That isn't an impossibility I guess, but I hope she doesn't have that kind of sensitivity, for her own sake.
"Dead man. I see dead man."
Ok, now J and I are just trying not to freak out. What the HELL is she talking about? Then, I notice the Walking Dead action figure on the mantle. J must have introduced it to her. I walk over and point to it. "Is this the man that you see?"
"Yeah. Dead man. I see dead man."
I'm trying not to make a big damn deal about this, as I silently shoot J some eye daggers. Really, dude? Does she really need to be familiar with your zombie action figure? Take that thing downstairs! Good grief. I don't need this kind of stress.
Beeping and Blinking
One of the beautiful things about babies is that they don't really know fear until they learn it. I was really enjoying this stage. She would look at the Halloween dracula that J hangs on the door and just laugh. She would could hear us making a lion sound or a dinosaur sound and think it was the greatest thing ever. She didn't know what a threat was, and that's the way it should be!
I intentionally didn't let J watch horror movies or violent shows in her presence, because I just don't think she needs those sounds and images in her mind. She will have plenty of time for the ugliness of the world, but for the time being let's just keep her experience pure, if we can, right? J thinks I'm being extreme, but I don't care.
At some point, fear seeps in anyway. I don't know when it happened. I just know that she had a total fit when I set her in her crib to nap one day. I went in to see what was up, and she was pointing at the smoke detector.
"What is that? What is that?" Crying and carrying on. Very disturbed.
"It's the smoke detector, honey. It's ok. Was it beeping?" I'm so sorry I ever introduced the idea that the thing could beep.
She talks about it all the time. "No beeping?" She eyes the thing warily every time she enters the room, and I say to her "No, it's not beeping, it just blinks sometimes. It's ok. It won't hurt you."
What happened was that she just happened to notice it blinking. She had never seen it before and didn't understand. She didn't have language for what was happening and she got worried. She's never heard it beep but she thought that beeping meant blinking.
Now she walks around the house with concern, "Beeping and blinking? Beeping and blinking?"
She's soaking it all in. Processing. So amazing and so delicate. How to teach her caution without unintentionally training her to be afraid of everything? This parenting business is like advanced Jedi training, I tell you what.
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