Emerging from the Babble

Lucy speaks English. This morning Jason said to her, "Clap, Lucy!" — without clapping himself —  and she clapped. This thrilled me, and I kept squealing "Clap, clap, clap!" Which she did a few times, then got bored and started pushing her hippo around. The point is she demonstrated clear, independent understanding of a word. Unlike the time when she was four months old and I said "hi" and she sighed "hi" back. I talked out myself of the idea that she really was saying hi, not just making a noise, but for a long time I kind of believed it.

She has been recognizing word-object connections for a while now. She knows who "Mamama" and "Dadada" and "Clifford" are. She has crawled to her bookshelf when I asked where the books are. She gets very excited and lunges for me when asked if she wants milk. She knows who "Duck" is, but doesn't understand that "Duck" is not only her blanket, but also the rubber thing in the tub and the quacking creature from "Old MacDonald."

She has said some words, but like that initial "hi," they may just be sounds. She clearly says Mamamamama, Dadadadada, and mimics "duck," "dog" and "book" in little grunts. Despite the fact that she doesn't say many other English words, she is quite a talker. While she's playing or padding around the house, she babbles, practing her phenomes and prosody in involved conversations with her toys or the dogs. She likes to "read" out loud, pointing and turning the pages.

Beyond the language she has already demonstrated, who knows what else she understands. Now is clearly the time to quit cursing. I know from "This American Life" that the favorite swear word among the nursery school set is the f-word. I'd hate for Lucy's early verbal aptitude to be first demonstrated through the proper use of
f-ing as an adverb.

Family Albums

Thumbing through our brittle old family albums, I realize that we need to take more pictures — and take better care of the ones we have. I have been assembling some photos for my dad's upcoming 60th birthday party and have immersed myself in the sometimes blurry details of my family's past. There are photos of my mom and dad at fraternity formals, in the snow, around the house, with a brand new baby me. And in a few of them, they even seem to be in love (these people, now divorced some 25 years). I knew they were once in love, but I enjoyed seeing it for myself.

There are, of course, tons of photos of me. I can hear the flashbulb popping in my memories of moments both important and mundane. My mother, in her fanatically organized fashion, has my young life laid out in neat albums with dates and names. And looking now at this history, I am grateful she took the time to record it so well. Naturally, all Jason's and my own photos — at least up until we had something so important as Lucy to capture — are in boxes, early years piled on recent ones, Big Bend camping and what-was-her-name-again shuffled amid Florence and Madrid and New Year's Eve 1999. I am a faithful keeper of every memento, every scrap. I just lack the patience to catalog it all.

Currently, we have lots of pictures of Lucy and the people who love her. For now, it all exists neatly online. But how will Lucy thumb through albums the way I have lately? I know there will be a virtual equivalent of these faded albums, but it scares me that all this could go away if we forget to renew the domain name.

"School"

We prefer not to call it daycare. It sounds too much like my nightmares — Romanian orphanage lite. So we call it "school," which for me conjures images of babies sitting quietly at their desks, learning calculus. Well, she is not learning calculus at her sweet little "school" (I can't seem to stop putting quotes around it, even in speech), but it is a great place where we are happy for her to spend 22.5 hours a week.

The school (an "infant care center" is what they call themselves, but that sounds like a hospital to me) is affiliated with a Methodist church. It's in a little building that almost looks like a portable, except for the concrete foundation, casement windows and the fact that it's been there for about 30 years. From the outside, it's a pretty dingy place. Hell, even on the inside, it is not as sterile-looking as many of the other daycares I visited. It reminds me of the church nursery I attended when I was little: the earnest smells of cleaning products and diaper cream, the sounds of baby chatter and tinkling toys, cheery reminders about washing hands and bringing supplies.

The best part of "school" is her teachers in the Bunny Room: an older Bangladeshi couple who have worked there for more than 12 years. Rokeya has a master's degree in early childhood from a university in Bangladesh. She is tiny and keen, with a musical voice and a very diplomatic way of telling you how you're doing things wrong. I am uncertain about the actual credentials of Monsur, her husband, but he can always be found in the rocking chair or on the floor virtually covered in babies. Either he doesn't speak all that much English, or he is more comfortable using singsong babytalk. But the babies LOVE him. Lucy has a duck blankie (the all-important transitional object that, when used in combination with the thumb, helps her manage almost any situation), and Monsur always asks her, "Where is Duck? Where is Magic Duck?" She grins and waves Duck at him.

At school, she has learned to wave and clap and mimic the hand motions to "Itsy Bitsy Spider." She goes on buggy rides — you should see Monsur pushing around the open-air bus full of babies. And every day, she gets a report card that tells us how much she slept, ate and pooped, as well as a brief paragraph about her activities and mood, written in Rokeya's elegant hand, which I hear in her musical accent: "Enjoyed listening xylophone music."

When I first started taking her to school, I thought my heart would break from her crying. Now, after a little more than two months, my heart breaks from her nonchalance — she joins the baby mosh pit without so much as a backward glance.

Miss Personality

For a while there, I worried that Lucy was shy. With strangers, she would cry and climb up my shoulder like she was trying to hide inside me. I knew this was normal separation/stranger anxiety, but I kept thinking, "What if she's shy? No kid of ours can be shy." It's not that I hate shy people, it's just that I always assume they hate me. Of course, everyone MUST like me, so I when I meet someone shy, I shift into social overdrive — a noisy, prattling gear that often has the opposite of its desired effect. So maybe the person starts out as merely shy, but in the end, indeed hates me. I am not shy. Jason is not shy. If Lucy is going to have a trait that neither of us possesses, couldn't it be tall?

I am relieved to report that she is not shy. I knew this for sure when she was flirting with a man on the plane home from El Paso yesterday. She kept climbing up to peek between the seats, grinning with all four teeth at some mustached stranger, reaching for his hand. If you're a stranger or relatively unknown to her, the trick to earning her affection is to ignore her. While she does get overwhelmed by throngs of adoring family, she manages to win friends in restaurants, at church, on planes, wherever she encounters seemingly disinterested people. Apparently she, like her mother, wants people to like her.

Even under the family love barrage this Christmas season, she stayed pretty social. She enjoyed tugging on mustaches (her future taste in men?), pulling off glasses, playing peekaboo, eating the sundry sweets and other inappropriate foods they gave her. All in all, she was charming and everybody liked her, which was a great relief to us. But what I will eventually have to accept is, outgoing or shy, liberal or conservative, we have a limited amount of control over what she likes, who she likes and how she is. Part of our bodies, yet still her own person, even at nine and a half months old. She hasn't even hit puberty, and I already feel the pangs of her breaking away. At least she isn't shy, or doesn't hate me — yet.