Laughing Buddha

If you’re wondering what it’s like to be a baby, just go strap yourself in to something: a car, a giant stroller, a shopping cart, anything will do. Strap yourself in for what you believe is going to be twenty minutes, and then stay that way for forty. Then imagine what you want to eat and being fed something different. Then imagine somewhere you’d like to visit, and being brought somewhere else. Then imagine being bathed, dressed, and undressed, in different order, at different times, and in different styles than you would have chosen, if anyone had bothered to ask you. Imagine wanting very much to make your feelings about all of the above known, and to have the ideas firmly in mind but not the language to communicate them. Imagine wanting to sleep when you’re made to wake up, and wanting to be awake when you are made to sleep. What would this number of mental challenges do to you? If you were my daughter, it would make you a little laughing Buddha with a budding mischievous streak. It would make you pretty much literally climb the walls as you looked for a way to express your individuality and then let out great sighs of relief when mom or dad came to bring you back down to earth. More than anything else, it would make you yearn for the next phase of your life – whatever it might be.

First Ice Cream

Baby had her first ice cream tonight. For reasons that made sense at the time, my wife and I elected to break our sugar fast and we also elected not to be hypocrites – to allow our beloved child to try something that various family members have begged us to let her have for months. Mostly, baby screwed up her face in response to the cold, the sweet, and, perhaps, the artificiality of it all. She looked cute with a ring of chocolate around her mouth. And, for a few moments, I thought we probably seemed like a pretty relaxed American family sitting around a blond-wood table with alloy-metal legs in an upscale ice cream parlor. And we probably were. But we also were kidding ourselves that the family bloodline, on either side, tolerates sugar normally. And, thankfully, our fifteen months of effort to create a healthy relationship to food on baby’s part appear to have meant something, when push came to shove. She’ll make her own choices, eventually; we just want the fish to know something of water – as unlikely as it may be.