Oh, Baby!

I mentioned last weekend when I got back that one of the most interesting things about visiting my sister was spending a week in the company of my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew. Well, at least one person -- Hi, Tamara! -- expressed an interest in hearing my thoughts on that experience, so, in my typical rambling fashion, here they are.

The thing is, I really do have extremely mixed feelings when it comes to small children. Yes, they're cute, they're cuddly, they're fun to play with. But, truth to tell, my main experience with them has been in the form of shrieking toddlers careening around inadequately supervised in public places. And every time I encounter one, I find myself thinking, "Oh, god, what absolute monsters kids are. Why on Earth would anyone willingly choose to reproduce and burden themselves with one of these horrible things?"

I have to admit, though, there is a huge difference between enduring the antics of a stranger's bored and restless child in the local laundromat and holding the hand of your own flesh and blood as he excitedly leads you through the zoo to the bat house. (And I'm not just saying that because I'm especially enamored of the bats myself, either, though it definitely didn't hurt.) And my sister's kid really does manage to push a lot of my positive buttons. Examples? Well, once, I retrieved a toy from under a hotel-room bed for him and triumphantly announced my success by exclaiming, "See! Aunt Betty is cool!"... Upon which he happily repeated "Betty is cool!" in the clearest voice you could imagine. And he later remembered that phrase, coming out with it several times quite unprompted on my most recent visit. OK, how could anyone possibly remain unaffected by that? Yeah, go ahead, stroke my ego, kid. It works!

Possibly even more guaranteed to hit Aunt Betty in her soft spot is his habit of grabbing books -- especially the ones I bought him on a shopping trip to Powell's -- and begging me, "Read! Read!" I ask you, how is a bookworm like myself to resist? The kid wants to read! Is there anything cooler?!

On the other hand... There's no doubt about the fact that life in the presence of a two-year-old can be both deeply frustrating and tremendously exhausting. Here's an entity that's every bit as self-centered and curious as a cat, but ten thousand times more demanding. He wants to get into everything. He wants you to show him everything. He demands constant attention, and makes constant demands, often for things it would be impossible or unwise to give him. He needs incessant supervision. He eventually becomes the subject of every single conversation. He makes once-ordinary tasks like a simple trip to the supermaket into an ordeal roughly equivalent to mounting an arctic expedition.

I've now come to realize something that I always knew intellectually but never really understood before: being the primary caregiver for a small child is not just a full-time job; it's damn near your entire life. I have to say, I deeply admire my sister's saint-like patience with the kid, especially given that she's got more than a few other major stressors in her life at the moment, too. I do like to think that I might be able to muster the same degree of patience myself if, heaven forbid, I had a child of my own to take care of. But I know with a certainty that even if I did, I'd be slowly going crazy inside. I know what I'm like when I don't get peace and quiet and time to myself, and it ain't pretty. At all.

All that having been said, though... While I have no desire to take it up as a full-time occupation, myself, there are delights to the toddler-tending experience. And I'm not talking about schmoopy cuddly-wuddly stuff, either, or at least not mostly. While I'll admit that my latent maternal instincts are not entirely unmoved by the experience of having a child sitting on my lap, it's my scientific side that's genuinely enthralled. The human brain, in my opinion, is one of the most endlessly fascinating objects in the universe, and when interacting with a toddler you can practically watch new neural connections forming right before your very eyes. It's amazing. It's downright awe-inspiring, in fact. Constantly when I'm around him I find myself cataloging an impressive list of things that he seems to be learning effortlessly, moment by moment... Often things that it would be hellaciously difficult to teach a computer to do. Examples? Why, certainly!

How about the development of that most profoundly human skill of all: language? Even in the few months since I'd seen him last, the kid's language skills have progressed significantly. He's putting together entire, grammatical sentences now, and even if they're still the exception rather than the rule, he's forming them correctly. And he's learning this simply by hearing other people talk; nobody's handed him a copy of Strunk & White and asked him to diagram a sentence. And, at his age, the human brain seems more than anything to be a vast vocabulary-acquisition machine. He's constantly seeking out new words. Conversations with him tend to consist of endless rounds of "what's this? what's this? what's this?" as he points at everything and gets its name. It's astounding how easily he remembers them, too; often he seems only to have to hear and repeat a word once in order to remember it later on. And, man, some of the words he's learned... He's got a book on fish (a subject with which he seems oddly obsessed), and not only does he know the word "fish" perfectly well, but he is capable of naming fish that I have to read the captions to identify. More than that, it seems reasonably clear that he's grasped the concept of "fish" as a general category, with "catfish," say, as a specific member of that category. This is some fairly abstract conceptualizing for such a tiny brain. And at one point, my sister, showing off just a bit, pointed at a picture in the fish book. "What's that?" she asked. "'Nemone!" he responded instantly. Quite rightly, too; it's an anemone, a creature I'm not sure the majority of adults are actually able to identify. Later, at the zoo, she pointed at an anemone in a tank. "What's that?" "'Nemone!" So he is not just capable of identifying pictures and of identifying objects, he's also perfectly capable of recognizing that the one is in fact a representation of the other. And, OK, OK, maybe that doesn't seem like much of a trick, but that's probably only because you've been doing it since you were in diapers, as well.

Other things he's already capable of? How about this incident: While squirming around on the couch, he accidentally bashes his mother's knee. "Sorry, mommy!" he cries. "Kiss!" And he bends down and kisses her knee, in exactly the kiss-it-all-better gesture she uses on his own boo-boos. Put a couple more checkmarks in the "mental skills developed" column: empathy and the ability to internally model the experiences of other people.

And yesterday, my sister called me on the phone and related the following story: She'd put him upstairs for his nap, but could hear from the noises coming over the baby monitor in his room that he was actually playing, not sleeping. Unable or unwilling to force him to sleep, and probably grateful enough to have a little time to herself in any case, she simply left him to it. A couple of hours later, she came up to get him. Obviously, he heard her coming, and when she opened the door -- despite the fact that he'd been making wide-awake "play" noises only a moment earlier -- he had one foot in the bed and one on the floor, as if he were just getting up. "I wake up!" he exclaimed brightly. My sister burst out laughing. "Why you sly little..." Ah, yes, the art of deception. An absolutely vital skill for any social animal to learn!

Humans are just so cool...