The Cerebral Mum

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After spending hours last night on a post I decided not to publish, I have decided to take one whole week off. I’ll still check in and reply to comments, and I’ll still be doing lots of reading and commenting on other blogs.

I just have a lot to juggle at the moment and I need lists and plans and a little bit of order if I am to manage it all. And lists and plans take time too.

The charity I mentioned earlier is kicking into gear and I will post a link and information when the website is ready to go. It is still a while off, however, as it involves a little global co-ordination.

The resource blog I will be starting has received no attention as yet, so I will be dedicating some time to that this week, planning content and schedules and layouts although I will need a little money to do the set up properly, so it may not launch until next year. The content is not time sensitive, however, so I can do as much writing and building as I like before it goes live. I know I’m being coy about the idea, but ideas are valuable!

I also have an update about Hughie, before I go. We really had no expectation that he would be alive today. The doctors made sure we had no expectation of that. Against all odds however, he’s still here and his condition is improving. He is no longer on full life support and he is slowly being weaned off the ventilator. When he saw him yesterday, he was conscious but severely jaundiced and groggy and unable to communicate in anyway. Today, when his daughter visited, he squeezed her hand very hard and cried. If he continues to improve, he may be out of the ICU in three days. What the long term prognosis is, we don’t know, but any extra days or weeks or months… well, they’re good.

Caspar continues to amaze me every day. He will sit for half an hour at his table scribbling, turning the pages of his drawing pad, comparing his crayons. This is above the level of concentration I was expecting him to have at 12 months. He is saying mum-mum a little, and experimenting with the various meanings of Ta (which he pronounces Dah). Considering his hearing impairment up until the age of 9 months, the lack of muscular development for speech and the scar tissue on his palate I am more than happy with this.

Also, as much as he loves books, his taste is impeccable. He loves those that have been well written, with rhythm and sounds an adult can admire, and those with high quality illustrations. He has no patience for the cheap and nasty, pulp baby stuff. I am not projecting. If I pick up an “average” book, he will replace it with a better one. If I insist on reading it, he wanders off.

He seems to be picking up the meaning of words at an almost alarming rate. After only hearing, and being shown, Put it back, twice, he can follow that instruction. He even closes the cupboard door afterwards. Rather than being a pushy mother, I think that I need to up-the-anti somewhat on providing him with things to learn. Growing minds must be fed. He’s already trying to sweep with an adult size broom. Surely, I can think of some more useful skills to teach him than that!

And did you know that you could actually play soccer with one year olds?

But I shall return to enumerate the wonders of Cas in a week.

Until then…

I knew it was coming. There were some valiant attempts earlier in the week. A white knuckled grip, a face mashed into the the upholstery, one knee high up against his side and one foot almost lifting off the ground. And two days ago he made it.

Yes, Caspar can now climb up onto the sofa. I’m impressed. I’m proud. I’m thrilled. But I’m also horrified. The logistics of the descent still seem a long way off. He thinks a head-first dive-bomb is the way to go and I can no longer leave the living room, even momentarily, while he is in it. Who will be there to catch him?

After a morning spent at the house I am selling, dragging old furniture and a pond and a pool table out to the nature strip for the annual hard rubbish collection, I actually spent some of my afternoon on the couch watching TV. Caspar is very good at entertaining himself. He likes patrolling the house, inspecting the floorboards, opening and closing doors and poking at whatever he discovers along the way. But he also likes his Mummy & Me time. And that means books.

So there I was, watching episode 3 of Grey’s Anatomy’s 4th season in a fairly half-assed way, perking up a little when Really Old Guy… No, better not mention that. It hasn’t aired here yet. Anyway, there I was on the sofa when Caspar came over and handed me one of his favourite books before clawing his way up and snuggling in to just the right spot for me to read to him. Needless to say, I turned the television off.

Let’s just dwell on that image for a minute, before I go on with my story. I can’t remember exactly when he started snuggling in by himself for story time, coming over with book in hand and sitting himself down on my knee whenever I was cross-legged on the floor but it still moves me each time. It is probably the clearest communication I have from him.

(When he shakes his head, no, he won’t hit me any more, does he really know what he is agreeing to? When he nods, yes, he’s finished his dinner, does he really understand what it means? Actually, I’m, pretty sure he has that one figured out. When I asked yesterday he had hardly eaten a thing but I let him down anyway so that he would learn. He promptly picked up his dinner so that he could continue eating while toddling off to say hello to Big Sis. Finished obviously means Get free. I think I got played.)

But I don’t think it’s the clear communication that puts butterflies in my stomach and a lump in my throat when he comes and claims his space, even though that is something to be proud of. It’s not even that he loves reading so much. I think it is the trust expressed - his trust in me, in my attention, in his place in my world - which is so very beautiful that it almost moves me to tears. I think it is in moments like these that you know you are doing a good job of being a mother.

But, being a mother, Caspar’s choice of a more elevated book time (elevated to sofa level) today seemed like a good opportunity to provide some instruction. Like any addict bookworm, one is never enough for him and his usual method of obtaining another fix more books when we are on the couch is to lunge over the edge to reach the bookshelf which doubles as a side table while I grab at his ankles like a bungee cord, trying to avert possible brain damage. Today, with a lot of patience on my part and very little on his, we did a some manoeuvring between stories to show him how to go down backwards. I’m not sure the message sank in though.

He’s right, after all: Head first is quicker.

Cas, unlike his mother, is a very observant child. I let him carry the keys between the car and the front door and he now reaches out to try and put them in the keyhole. He is also paying close attention to door handles and can confidently turn the lights on and off. Clever little fella.

One of the things that I’ve learned about being a mother is how incomprehensible time is. While I was pregnant, the possibilities of Cas’ whole life were running through my mind. I never thought about having a baby, I thought about having a person, and suddenly things like life insurance and a will and a college fund became things I had to consider. Now.

I was very aware of him throughout what was a wonderful pregnancy, a pregnancy during which I felt more comfortable in my skin than I ever had in my whole life, during which I felt more beautiful than I had in my whole life (except for that last week once I had stopped work, and the week after that when it didn’t look like he had much motivation to enter the world), during which I felt so connected to every breath, every heartbeat and every mood of the child growing inside me. But in spite of my awareness it was still a surprise to meet him. I was surprised by the separateness.

I don’t mean that I felt disconnected, or felt less of a bond, but I didn’t realise how immediately he would be a person, that he didn’t need to grow into one. He came into this world an individual, limited by his inability to hold his head up, or speak, or feed himself, but an individual nonetheless. He came into the world distinctly himself, no longer a part of me, and I found myself waiting eagerly for him to grasp that first toy, to see that first smile, to hear that first babble, I found myself waiting for his individuality to be translated into the movements and the language I could understand, wanting to learn more about him, to learn more about us. I felt privileged not see him become, but to see him be.

With motherhood time becomes both too fast and too slow. This is a cliche, I guess, but it was something I could conceptualise yet did not know. With every new skill, new expression, new sound, I wanted the next, and the next and the next, but as all these things started piling up, I realised how quickly time passes. It is odd to be so impatient when the world is spinning too quickly. It is odd to want time to stop at the same as I want all my tomorrows.

I long for my baby and my boy and my man in equal measure.

And the possessive pronoun in that sentence makes no sense to me. He is so far from being mine, this individual whom I clothe and feed and bathe and lay down to sleep. Motherhood is both temporal and eternal. We get to watch our children unfolding day by day, yet, in those transcendent moments, we can see them complete.

I am a caretaker. Even as he clings to my legs for balance, I am a caretaker. Today when, for the first time, he walked the length of the room without a hand to hold or furniture to lean on and he came to me, all those future moments when he will be walking in the opposite direction were present.

I can’t wait to see him to walk out into the world, into his own life, but I am grateful that for we humans this takes so much longer than it does for a foal to first stand on its tentative, sticky, newborn legs. I am grateful that we get to hold onto the present and the future for so long, even though I know when that day comes, I will wish it had been longer.

Well, not exactly no words. After research from the University of Washington was published in a Journal of Pediatrics article [1] on August 8, Bob Iger, the President and CEO of The Walt Disney Company which owns Baby Einstein had quite a few words to say.

He said, amongst other things, that UW’s press release was “deliberately misleading, irresponsible and derogatory”. [2]

And what did this “irresponsible” press release say? That baby DVDs, such as those from Baby Einstein, may actually hinder an infant’s development rather than help it. That for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants up to the age of sixteen months understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Rather than provoking me to anger, like Iger, my response to this news was identical to those of many bloggers and many parents around the world: “Well, Duh…”

It’s common sense (I feel confident in saying this as apparently only 49% of us think these DVDs will make our bundles of joy more intelligent) that a baby will learn more language from some good, old-fashioned human interaction than they will from watching screensavers with a little Mozart playing in the background. Indeed, on one of my more arrogant days while I was pregnant I could be heard in the baby department saying over-loudly that a child of a parent who buys Baby Einstein obviously has some genetic disadvantages when it comes to their IQ anyway.

But let’s be honest. Most of us know watching television is a mind-numbing exercise - that’s why we do it. And most of us know that the only benefit of an infant sitting in front of the box for fifteen minutes is that we get to have a quiet cup of coffee. If we spend the bulk of our time playing and talking and reading we won’t “bias the child toward visual-dominance at the expense of listening/language dominance in their later life”, as one leading pioneer in brain plasticity puts it, and no lasting harm will be done.

So why the furious demand for a retraction of a press release stating the obvious?

Baby Einstein specifically states that their products “are not designed to make babies smarter”[3] but their sales are pretty dependent on those 49% of people who, lacking common sense, think that they do. I know it, and they know it, and the US Federal Trade Commission might soon have something to say about it too, which is why more than a week later they are still baying at the moon.

So here is the crux of what I have to say to you, Bob Iger…

Do those six to eight words missing from our babies’ vocabularies happen to include “deliberately misleading”? Because those two seem pretty crucial when it comes understanding what Baby Einstein is all about.