Sitting Bull

Our Aries baby just began to sit unassisted two weekends ago. Between this latest milestone and starting solids, I am starting to reclaim my body as “mine” again. For me, surviving babyhood is about celebrating these small victories back to the self I once was—BC, before children.* Although I am still young Miss Vivian’s personal milk slave, so we have some distance to travel before I can stop wearing shirts with an eye toward easy access.

I find young Miss Vivian to be a focused baby. She sees a toy—usually one with small, removable parts—that she wants and rolls toward it. She grabs her bottle with both hands. In the morning, you better make sure that your coffee cup remains beyond her reach. Young Miss Vivi is the wiley sort of baby who will arch her back and strrrretch in order to gain that extra inch toward the desired item just past the kitchen table’s Forbidden Zone—home to adult beverages and sharp utensils. In fact, we gave up on using the Bumbo seat in favor of the high chair for feeding time. Both of us, parental units, quickly tired of her extending her apple-puree covered limbs and grabbing anything within a five-inch radius of her blue plastic seat.

Overall, I would say that Vivian is a pleasant baby. Unlike her brother, she managed to sail through newborn phase without colic. And, I won’t waste more blog space talking about how well she sleeps. Every day we do a little happy dance as we give thanks to the baby sleep gods. Unfortunately, Parental Unit #2 and I are about to enter a new world with Vivian, a world so scary that it makes my miserable pregnancy seem like easy gravy—I am talking about teething. What? I can’t hear you because 1) this is a blog and 2) my shoulders are up to my ears in tense anticipation of the coming dental storm.

*as if that is even possible!

Halloween Shenanigans

This past summer, young Master Bertram would spend at least 20 minutes watching the construction work taking place along one of the main drags where we live. Bertram was particularly obsessed with the blue dump truck, the backhoe, and the front-end loader. One day, the man directing traffic around the construction site even gave Bert his orange flag. Bertram waved that flag, which was quite heavy for a 2.5 year old to carry, up and down the street with glee.

Thus when the time came to decide upon this year's Halloween costume, I was not surprised that Young Master B chose to dress up as a construction worker. Of course, Bertram wanted to be not just any generic construction worker, he wanted to be The Flag Man. Parental Unit#2 and I got down to business with grand ambitions of making a family costume around the theme of construction work. Parental Unit #2, who is mighty fond of the color orange, decided to dress up as a traffic cone at one of the many Halloween events we attended. I scaled down the hat he made to fit the little lady, and the next thing you know, she was the traffic cone. Since I had to carry the traffic cone, I became the road. Note that the sling I'm wearing has two lanes. When we went trick or treating, one of our friends observed that Parental Unit #2 (who sadly didn't manage to procure another costume after his traffic cone debut) could be considered the pot hole.


As tradition dictates, this was the third year of our Baby World Leader Costume Contest. Since we host the contest, we don't compete officially, but we always have an entry. Unfortunately, Young Master B is going through a phase where he refuses to have his picture taken. He prefers to click the camera buttons and scroll through previous shots. Knowing this, I decided to focus on young Miss V as Queen Victoria. The picture shown above is one of my favorite outtakes.

Okay, Little Lady

When Vivian cries, my response is, "okay, little lady." Bertram, my ever-faithful, repeating toddler, says it too, like an echo.

Paging Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Parts of me want to capture two-year-old Bertram in a bottle and keep him this way forever. You know where you stand with young Master Bertram at two years of age: the highs are extreme and will manifest in exuberant jumping and running. He will bound into our laps and say, “aw, huggy!” He cannot resist kissing Vivi and saying, “Eyes. Nicely.” That is young Master B shorthand for what we often tell him, “Touch her eyes nicely.”

Also, I know that I’m his mother, but I do believe that Bertram has a great, warm smile. The kind that radiates outward—you can’t help but smile when you see it. I think, for this reason, young Master B has quite the following. Indeed, I often feel like I’m traveling with the tiny blond mayor of our block.

I was particularly charmed by Young Master B’s exuberant happiness to attend his first art class. (It was just him and me as Parental Unit #2 held down the fort with young Mistress Vivian.) I told Bertram that we were going to make art, and he clapped his hands and said, “Yeah art!” He then proceeded to walk on his tippy toes for most of way there, squealing “art!” At the class, we were encouraged to take the paper off the crayon, so that we could use the sides and the tip to make circles and lines. I think Bert’s favorite part of the class involved the star stickers. He hopped around the room, putting the little stars on everything—my neck, the paper, the floor, his shorts. We had a blast.

Yet, with the toddler’s uberbliss also comes the dark underbelly—the extreme anger, frustration, and sadness. In what seems like an instant, young Master B will go from joy to screaming, crying and rolling around on sidewalk like a possessed demon. Of course, I do not want to bottle this part of two-year-old Bertram. No, no this side of Bertram makes me want to run for my liquid friends, Senora Corona and Don Prosecco.

How I wish that these tantrums could be like an aria—Bert alone onstage, feeling his emotional pain, and we the parental units waiting to respond in the audience. Yet, now we have the Vivian Factor, which means Bert’s tantrums can easily set off a high-pitched newborn squawking session. Just imagine old Parental Unit #1 pushing a stroller the size of the Queen Mary down the street with two screaming kids—old women giving her the look that translates to “clearly, you are an awful mother.” That’s fun times, that is.

What strikes me is the intensity of Bertram’s feelings. For example, Bert loves trains, from old-fashioned steam engines to boxy silver subway cars. And, in an effort to not be land locked in our apartment because we have to schlep two kids and the stuff of two, Parental Unit #2 and I have tried to use our weekends to get away from our home base. This means that we take the subway. On the train, Bertram is lovely; he quips along with the computerized voice command to, “Stand clear of the closing doors please.” He likes to watch the lights flicker in the tunnel as the subway rattles along on the tracks.

Once we reach our destination and start to exit the station, I can almost see the pain in Bert’s face, because we are leaving such a fantastic and wondrous thing as the New York City subway. “Train! Train! Aaaaagh!” yells a tearful Young Master B with limbs flailing about and his body jerking against the stroller straps. If I, too, had just discovered trains, I might be similarly enraptured. Oh, but what a drag it is for his parental units to carry his thrashing body away from the station. We must make an offering of yogurt raisins to distract the angry spirit, so that the gleeful boy will return. All the while, Vivian gums the outer rim of her carrier with gusto. I think she must be taking notes.