Shannon Phillips

Sometimes when we’re nursing (which now we only do a few times a day) I’ll turn on the TV. If Sesame Street is on, we’ll watch that. Well, Robin responded instantly and strongly to Elmo. I don’t know what it is about that particular muppet—the red color, the squeaky voice—but Robin points to the screen and coos whenever Elmo happens to appear. It’s kind of freaky how immediate and how strong his response is.

So we bought him a couple of Elmo videos. And yes, he is mesmerized by them. He doesn’t pay attention to much else on TV, but Elmo is like baby crack. I don’t let him watch the videos every day (I want him to get plenty of active play), but today because he’s sick I put one on. And as always, he’s enthralled. What is it about Elmo?

I guess I’m falling behind in updating this blog.  It seems like things have slowed down from when Robin was a newborn; we’ve fallen into a routine and there’s not always much new to report.  Last weekend we got to see Nonna and Pappy, which made Robin very happy.  Boy was he sorry when they left.

We didn’t do much for Halloween except that I made a nice harvest dinner of pork chops smothered in apples, roast carrots and fennel, and pumpkin cheesecake.  Nonna and Pappy brought a cute Halloween-themed bib (pictured) which Robin wore to charm everyone who saw him.

We also bought a toy bow thinking he could dress up as Robin Hood, but the components of this costume are actually pretty much everyday-wear for him:

That picture’s horribly over-exposed but it’s the only one I have where you can see the bow.  Here’s one where the lighting is better:

This morning I’m feeling overwhelmed in the aftermath of the election—pleased by Obama’s win, of course, but depressed about Prop. 8 here in California. And Robin has a runny nose. I hope he’s not going to get too sick.

Is appearing now on the lower right.  I think it’s causing him some pain: he’s been fussy and sometimes he clutches at his ears. He went through a phase before of doing this and the pediatrician told us that he was probably feeling teething pain in his ear canal. I’ve been giving him some baby Tylenol when it seems to be really bothering him.

Tooth #9 is peeking out in the back of Robin’s mouth, on the lower left side!  It made kind of a nasty looking bulge before it actually came out, which I briefly panicked about until I found it on the Internet: it’s called an “eruption hematoma,” it’s totally normal and fine. It’s gone now anyway.

I’m using this as a segue to tell you about another of Robin’s behaviors that both Sam and I found disturbing until we looked it up on the Internet. You know, the Internet is great. I know some doctors complain about people self-diagnosing themselves with all kinds of crazy things they read about online, but for me the ol’ World Wide Web has been a source of immense support and reassurance.

So, Robin’s a head banger. When he’s frustrated—especially when I take something away from him, or sometimes when he’s very sleepy—he will lean over and very deliberately bash his head against the floor. This is upsetting to watch, and our fears naturally flashed to autism.

But it turns out that head banging is surprisingly common, especially in boys: one in five kids will engage in this behavior. They generally stop doing it at about age 3. They don’t really hurt themselves doing it (baby heads are well-designed to take this kind of routine bumping), and in a very social baby like Robin, who babbles, points to things, makes frequent and prolonged eye contact, and loves to play and cuddle, there’s no reason to fear autism. The head banging is just his way of venting negative energy, and as he gets more physically adept he will give it up in favor of more advanced tantrum strategies. So, we have that to look forward to.

The parenting web sites advise that we should discourage the head banging by not reacting to it at all, but I find this impossible. I always pick him up and soothe him. I figure he’s expressing a need for comfort, and even if I don’t like the way in which he’s processing it, I’m still not going to ignore his distress.

In other developmental news, Robin’s learned how to “give us five,” and can be amused for long stretches by clapping his hand against ours. He can also point to various parts of our face on command: nose, mouth, forehead. Once when we were playing this game he stuck his tongue out, and I stuck my tongue out, and following a silly impulse I leaned forward so that our tongues were touching. This absolutely delighted him and now he wants to do it all the time and I regret ever, ever teaching him about tongues, because the tongue game is admittedly pretty gross.

Also, as I mentioned in the comments of the last post, he can now stack one block on top of another, which is a milestone the baby book said to look out for. And he continues to walk more and more every day.

How when two babies are in a restaurant or something, they’ll start calling to one another across the crowds? I call it “babysong” because it reminds me of whales sounding through the deep.

Robin’s vocabularly is expanding; he now has probably a dozen words that he says regularly. None of them are English and I’m not sure any of them have a fixed meaning, but they are syllabic patterns that he repeats frequently. Some examples:

lee-oh
loobally
gi! (Yes, always with the exclamation point.)
abba
wo-oh
ma! (It’s not clear that he means this particularly as a way to get my attention, but I do always respond)
dadada (For some reason “ma!” is short and urgent, but dadada is generally babbled at length.)

On the walking front, he now will regularly walk a few steps here and there; he must have done it five or six times today. But for going long distances he still crawls.

Breaking, breaking, this just in. Robin likes baths now!

As I posted earlier, Robin went through a very marked bath-phobia phase. He loved to splash in fountains, but just try and lower him into a bathtub and he would SCREAM like monsters were eating his toes. He was all right—barely—if we took him into the shower with us, but he’d just cling and look wide-eyed and unhappy until it was over.

I guess he just started getting better and better with the showers, until one day he was actually smiling and reaching out his hand to the fall of water. So that day I tried lowering him down to stand in the tub while I soaped him up. He found he really liked it; the next day we tried the same thing but let the tub fill up a bit; and by the third day we could just take a normal bath. Now he loves the bath! As soon as anyone starts running the faucet he will speed into the bathroom, pull himself up on the side of the tub, and start pointing inside while hooting urgently.

I still have no idea what the original problem was.

Robin still isn’t really walking or talking, but he continues to improve his skills in both areas. He spends more and more time upright—either clinging to furniture, or walking while I hold his hands—and his range of verbalizations continues to increase. One funny thing he’s doing now is imitating another boy at the park, Dino, who’s a year older and can actually talk a little bit. Dino tends to repeat a single word over and over in a sing-song inflection: for example, when he wants to play with Robin’s shovel, he’ll say “Digger digger digger digger!” So Robin has started imitating Dino’s pattern of speech, substituting syllables that are easier for him to say: “lee-oh lee-oh lee-oh lee-oh,” but in the exact same tones. It’s hilarious and scary at the same time. He’s already imitating the bigger kids! How long can it be before he starts demanding hi-tops and cheesy poofs?

Sometimes? When I have a plate of food in front of him that I’m feeding him, but he’s full? Robin will grab a fistful of food and shove it in my mouth. If I let him do this, he’ll chortle in delight, and keep shoveling food in my maw basically for as long as I’ll let him. I think it’s a fundamentally nice impulse on his part. He wants to give back to his community!

Robin took his first step today!  He was holding onto our TV stand, and I was sitting on a chair in front of my computer, only a little bit away, and he totally let go of the TV stand and walked over to me.  It was amazingly great!

Before Robin performed this incredible feat of human ambulation, I was thinking about writing a post to this blog titled “Robin’s Projects.” I was going to tell you all that even though Robin isn’t really talking yet, it’s become very obvious to Sam and me that there a few things his brain is really focusing on right now.  One of those things is the whole concept of containers.  Robin is fascinated by things that can be put inside other things, or conversely, things that can be taken out of other things.  He has a whole array of expensive toys but probably his favorite right now are my hair curlers, which he can remove from their setting and drop into all kinds of other containers, like the bathtub.  But he also likes rounding up things (like blocks) and dropping them into other containers (like my lap).  Nanita got to experience this obsession first-hand when she introduced Robin to a set of stackable cups and a tray that held them.  Hours of fun!

Another of Robin’s current projects is physical: he loves gravity.  Dropping things is a big pastime.  At some point, of course, the physics experiment becomes a psychological one: it turns from “What will happen when I drop my stuffed doggie over the side of my stroller?” to “How many times will Mommy pick my doggie up for me before she stops giving it back to me?” But still I think that dropping things has an intrinsic interest.

Robin also loves stairs, as I think I’ve mentioned before—but he particularly loves them when he can drag something up to drop down once he reaches the top.  But even when he doesn’t have anything to drop, he’ll make beeline for any staircase in his vicinity.  Watching him pull himself up, step after step—or toddle down, clinging to my fingers—I can’t help but think that he sees this as his work.  He’s practicing for something, something important.

And today, after watching him take a step all by himself, I think all his hard work has paid off!  This little human is creating himself, bit by bit, just like he did when he was in my womb.  He knows what he needs to do in order to become the human he’s meant to be.  And it’s my job to boost that instinctual understanding as far as it will carry him.

Reading back from the pictures I posted today—to the pictures I posted two weeks ago—I’m astonished at how much Robin has changed.

Everyone says they grow up fast. Once again, I guess, I’m here to report what everybody else already knew. I just—I just wasn’t prepared for it to be this fast.