Benjamin Penguin

Dear Benjamin,

Oh, hey. Yeah, it’s about 6 days away from you turning 17 months. Even though I know the monthly letter to you is going to be late, and I know it is because I am rolling around on the ground playing with you instead of sitting behind a keyboard, I still feel guilty. So much so that I cannot help but remark upon it EVERY.SINGLE. TIME. Somehow I must believe that if I type this reminder to myself every month that I am falling behind on my letters to you, then I will be shamed into some non-procrastinatory state, but if recording things were truly effective in changing my behaviors, that food journal would be sitting in the hands of a much slimmer woman.

I don’t know where to begin, actually. I have begun to think of myself as an alpine reporter. Let me explain. If I were part of a team of reporters working a mountain somewhere, I think the easiest job would be the reporter at the summit. Let’s say that a snowball forms and, as it rolls down the mountain, it gets bigger and bigger and causes more damage. If I was the reporter at the top of the mountain, my story would be relatively short. “There is a snowball forming. And oh, look! It’s rolling off the edge of the peak. The end.” As the snowball rolls down the mountain, the story will change as the snowball picks up speed, weight and girth. Somewhere around the middle of the mountain, a different reporter is challenged to tell a much different story. “A moderate-sized snowball is rolling down the hill at increasingly rapid speed. It appears to be swallowing up branches and small bushes laying in its path and one car hear the worried chatter of squirrels and deer echoing through the trees.” By the time the snowball gets to the bottom of the hill, the story becomes truly difficult to write because there are so many details one could explore and explain and so many angles from which to tell the story and only so many brain cells that the reporter can use to process the information. It almost becomes too overwhelming to tell the tale, so much so that the inclination is to say something to the effect of “Snowball! Big! Coming at us! Dear God, is that a clogged foot sticking out of there?!”

This is increasingly what it feels like to write these monthly letters. The truth is, every day that I awake now, I can expect that you will be doing something different. Some things are small changes or modifications to something that you have been able to do for quite a while now. You’ve been able to rise to a standing position for a while now, but now you can do so without holding on to anything –  from a seated position, from a squat, or even from a supine position. This has given you the ability to quickly change positions and locations, a behavior that forced us to make some modifications of our own. When you needed my help to get up, I could be somewhat leisurely in my response to you and could rest assured that you would stay put until I got to you. Now, however, I can hear the little gears turning in your head and before I even have time to react, you are up and off and barreling to explore something only a toddler would find fascinating. Like a discarded cheese wrapper, which, by the way, you refer to as “seeeze!” Emphasis on the exclamation point. And I do mean emphasis. Like your Mama, everything is worthy of a flair for the exuberant and dramatic. No one in this house owns keys. We own “keeeeeyce!” Trains pass by our apartment a lot, and I know this because, like a little conductor on caffeine, you proclaim “too too!” (choo choo, natch) every time a train rolls by. No, really. Every time. I never realized how often trains pass by.

Other things, like the expansiveness of your vocabulary, have really grown as of late. I have been asking Daddy to write down all the new words and expressions you have been saying over the past month.  Sadly, I think that we haven’t recorded all of them and it seems impossible to do so unless we tail after you with a notebook in our hands. Of course, if we did, you would just pry said notebook out of our hands and begin ripping all the pages out, so it seems like the diligent recording of every new word might just be a lost cause. And by the way? You take great delight in ripping paper. Actually, so do I, so I can’t fault you there. I am incapable of throwing a piece of paper into the recycling bin without methodically ripping it into tiny, tiny bits.

But the words. Let me share a smattering of the words that we can remember you learning over the past month. First, there is “bup” (bug). Did I ever mention the little black bups that live in here? We don’t really know what they are, but think they are some form of a very small beetle. They come and go often and nearly drive Daddy to drink. He hates bups. Remind me to tell you about the time that a winged, angry bup got caught in his shirt one night and he ran flailing through the house, clawing at his shirt and screaming at the top of his lungs. Your response to bups is more like Mama’s – a quick eyebrow raise and a head tilt and then on your way. However, you do seem to mirror Daddy’s tendency to want to remove all bups from the apartment. When you see one, you’ll shout “bup” and then bring one of us over to the insect and point at it until Daddy makes it go away. Daddy generally disposes of the bup post haste and I try to convince myself that I’m not living amongst committed insect killers. It’s not that I like bups per se. I just don’t like things dying.  But I think Daddy likes that you have no tolerance for bups. Recently, a bup was making a solitary march across the floor and you were watching it intently until it wandered under the piano and you could no longer see it. After it disappeared from sight, you started waving and saying “buh bye” and in that moment I thought, “Now, that is Mama’s boy.”

Our favorite children’s show in this house is “Sponba” (Spongebob Squarepants, for those not in the know). Sponba is a sponge that lives in a pineapple under the sea. We love Sponba. We sit in our special little toddler-sized chair and guffaw at the antics of the wee little sponge. This is not to say that we do not have other viewing pleasures.  Daddy nor I never intentionally set out to engage you in manly pursuits. I watch torrid celebrity gossip shows and read trashy gossip blogs. Daddy is always boring me to tears by reading me quotes from financial articles. Nothing about us would suggest that we are the type of people to promote a love of big construction vehicles and large trucks and trains, but sure enough, you love these things.  You love them in person, to be sure, but you are also quite content to watch videos of these things on Youtube. I am not sure where this interest stems from. We didn’t teach you to be excited when a plane flies overhead or when a truck rolls by, and yet you are marvelously excited when these things do occur. I think it is rather endearing and sweet because it is a passion that you seemed to form independent of our own interests. I constantly try to get you to roll your eyes with me when we watched yet another American Idol contestant butcher another note, but you’ll have none of that. No, you are more content to look out the window at the random American Airlines flight soaring through the clouds.  As you grow older, this will happen more often and I am so eager to see who you will become. What will you like? What will you dislike? Can we at least agree that The Smiths are totally awesome?

Your penchant for laughing at Sponba has lead me to conclude that you are starting to realize when things are funny and independently laughing without our own laughter prompting the gleeful response. In the past, you would laugh when we were laughing, but it was clear that you really weren’t sure what you were laughing at. WE were laughing because we saw something funny. YOU were laughing because you wanted to make a similar sound. Now, however, I think you are finding things funny and laughing because these things prompt you to laugh. One day when you and I were at the park, I was sitting on this little stoop and you were walking around nearby, picking up all the wood chips and rearranging them in an order that seemed to make sense to you. You decided to amble on over and join me on the stoop and as you were trying to climb up, you gently toppled backwards and fell on your butt. As you tried to get up, you fell backwards on to your back and then couldn’t seem to get coordinated enough to get up. And then? You started laughing. It was the exact same thing I, as an adult, would do if I unexpectedly tumbled in front of a loved one as I was goofing around and then couldn’t get up from the ground. It’s funny. It’s funny to be out of shape and rolling around like a bup on its back, unable to right yourself. Once you started laughing, I couldn’t help but laugh and then you laughed even more. It was our funny little joke and, for a moment there, I had to mentally recognize how much I was absolutely going to adore hanging out with you when you get older. I love being around people that make me laugh and I love trying to make people laugh. It’s one of the main reasons I love being around Daddy. He can always make me laugh, and I him. I shouldn’t have been surprised that you have a well-developed funny bone as well, but I was, and it was one of the most pleasant discoveries I have had in a very long time.

I am also beginning to wonder if you are tidy. This is supremely wonderful if you are, as I most assuredly am not.  Daddy is a tidy man. Don’t let me tell you how many times he can be found with a broom or a towel in hand. He’s always scrubbing this or arranging that or wiping this or sweeping that. You have a particular dislike of “ock” (?) and will point to any speck of filth, dirt, crumb or snit and stare up at us, awaiting its removal. You are also quite good at handing us ock so that we may dispose of it for you. I am often being brought little things that you find on the floor of the apartment. Now, you would think that with all Daddy’s tidying, there would be very little ock remaining, but this suggests that you are forgetting that you all live with me. Ock is something I trail into our lives every single day. Be it the schmutz on my shoes or the errant pamphlets I am handed on my commute or the scraps of paper and gum wrappers falling from my bag or the Cheerios that fall from my hand as I attempt to shovel a handful into my mouth, there is no limit to the number of items you and Daddy can attend to on a given day. I’d like to think I keep you both on your tidy little toes.

You certainly keep me on my toes. Do you ever rest? Not really. You are a little man not content with sitting still. You parade from the kitchen to the hallway to the bedroom to the hallway to the living room to the hallway to the dining room to the window to the kitchen. And this is just within the first five minutes of waking. I’m exhausted at the end of the day, true, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy it. I may have mentioned this before, but when you were still very little, people would always tell me to enjoy your infancy because soon you’d be walking and then I’d regret it. I’d be sad at how active you were and how independent you became. Outwardly, I’d smile dully so as not to appear rude, but inside I was screaming, “”Heaven help me, I’m so bored and I can’t wait until the moment when I get to tear around after this child, thank you very much.” The truth is, I really like that you are active and more independent. Mostly because I get a tremendous kick out of watching you. I love to see what you are going to do next. Maybe you’ll grab a toy and beat something with it. Maybe you’ll make a loud, arbitrary sound that seems disconnected from what you are doing. Maybe you’ll stare at me and then peel off down the hallway giggling. It’s so hard to say because it’s so unpredictable and it’s so enjoyable precisely because it is this unpredictable.

Pre-child, when I used to see parents at the park with their little kids, I always found it so curious that they could take such rapturous delight in their child racing away from them or sloppily skipping down the sidewalk or throwing leaves into the air. I never quite got how that could be so amusing. From the outside, it never seemed all that interesting. But what I failed to take notice of was the way in which the child and the parent were connecting in ways that I could not appreciate because I had never experienced it. I never saw the way the child tried to get her parent’s eye or the way the parent mischievously poked the child with a twig to get him to laugh and run away. I couldn’t observe these things because I didn’t know what to look for. Now, when I am at the park, I see these subtle interactions between parents and children and I know why they are so pleasurable. I know because I know what I would do in that situation to get you to laugh or smile and I know what you could do to get me to do the same. It’s amazing how much you have enlarged my world – how you have helped me to enjoy all the things hidden in plain view that I could never take note of before your arrival. I always knew that parenting would change me, but I am tickled to uncover that all of the changes have made my life that much more worth living.

Love,

Mama