Thursday, July 14, 2005

He's more of a social eater

Today I took the car to the Saturn dealer to be serviced for regular maintenance. Noah and I waited in the play area. I couldn’t help compare the Noah of today with the little baby I brought with me to the Saturn dealership in February. In February he couldn’t even sit up. While we waited I dangled toys in front of him in his infant carrier and then bounced him around the showroom a bit. Today Noah stared at the other children that were there, played with the bead sorter I sat him in front of, crawled over to a Barbie jet and tried to pull himself inside of it, crawled over to the lego table and pulled himself up on it, and then sat himself back down and started flinging things into the bead sorter. He’s this little playing, traveling man now. It’s insane.

Also insane is the fact that this little man is still reluctant to feed himself. Every day I try new ways to try to entice him to put Gerber Puffs in his own mouth. And occasionally he gets one in there and I celebrate like he parted the Red Sea. But more often he plays with the Puffs for awhile and then drops them, and when I retrieve them he opens his mouth wide to be fed. Tricky bugger. I tried modeling self feeding by feeding myself Puffs very deliberately. I even ate Puffs from his hands so he could see how it was done. He found this hysterical – smiling and laughing. In fact he enjoyed it so much that now when he picks up Puffs he holds them out to me as an offering. Maybe he thinks that it’s much cooler to be fed and therefore I can feed him and he can feed me. And the whole world should just convert to this new more social form of eating. Because if you just feed yourself who will wipe your mouth with your bib and tell you that you’re “all done.”

Some people aren’t into babies. They prefer dogs. I totally get that. Though I find puppies to be super cute I’m not really a dog person. I always figured if I wanted something that dependant on me then I’d have a baby. And so I did. The “Red” leader of the maintenance team at the dealership is obviously a dog person – not really into the whole baby thing. When I was sitting at his desk for ten minutes checking in the car his only response to Noah was to tell me he wanted to buy his dog a pacifier. Which totally amused me. But it gets better. Noah and I were sharing the play area with a woman with a 3 year old girl and 19 month old boy. The mom needed to take her daughter to the bathroom and since we had already been talking she felt comfortable leaving her son with me. Once her son realized his mom had left he headed for the door – so I had to leave Noah playing on the floor in the far corner of the room to sit in the seat blocking the exit. At this moment the “Red” leader came to tell me my car was ready. He then looked at this 19 month old boy and addressed him as if he were my son. I nearly peed myself. Apparently Noah had aged over ten months in 40 minutes. But I have no doubt that guy would have recognized my dog.

And I can't believe Baby Bella is barking already!!! AMAZING.

4 comments:

hazel said...

yes, for some people, babies are less interesting than pets. or plants. or dust.

he has so much mobility now! he's such a happy little guy, too. he's just so adorable that I want to kidnap him, clone him, and give him back.

I know you don't think so, but having him not shove every little thing into his mouth is actually quite a good thing. bella ate a handful of the dog's hair the other day.

Missuz J said...

I agree with Noah. We should all switch to the "feed one another" method of eating. I think I'm going to see if I can get Erik and a few friends on board. I'll let you know how it goes.

It was very fun reading about your swimming trip. How did he do with the chlorine? Soph gets a little rashy.

NME said...

He wasn't thrilled with getting the chlorine in his eyes. But he didn't get too rashy. I made sure I rinsed him off immediately afterward.

Jen O. said...

I think some people just don't know how to relate to kids, especially if they have never had many kids in their lives. I know I am that way. The thing most synonymous to to kids is dogs, for some people: they can communicate on a visceral level, you have to clean up after them, and they're as loving as can be.