Nine Months August 2 - 22, 2004 Our baby is an omnivore

	Separation Anxiety? On the contrary, Tom's trying to push aside our sliding door to escape from his boring parents' attentive gaze!

Tom was nine months old already by the end of July, but since our pediatrician was on vacation, we passed the exam with a two week delay. It really makes no difference, as I am still not quite sure about Tom's real age, since he so categorically refused to celebrate his birthday on Christmas, as was originally planned.

A nurse measured Tom's twenty one pounds and eight ounces, a whole 100 grams under our family estimate of ten kilo. Twenty nine and a half inch, though, matched with my eyeball figure of 75 centimeters. Either way, our tiny baby is of mildly above average size, even among full-term three-quarter year olds. Further, I could positively answer most queries regarding Tom's skills. The doctor laughed when I characterized Tom's crawling as Meresyev-style (after a famous, crippled Russian ace pilot who was shot down during WW2) - he slides on his left knee, while pushing with his right foot. This he does indoors; on our back yard, where sliding is not so easy, he skips the part with the knee and crawls symmetrically, using both feet. She said it was his "specific" motion style. Well, I shall have to live with it somehow -- having a child with personality, and now he's also specific.

	Cars from grandma -- the only adult our Tom is willing to wave "goodbye" to

Yet I was not able to confirm whether Tom suffers from separation anxiety, which was supposed to come around his eight month. He really does not seem to hesitate to abandon his mother, especially while a partly open bathroom door leads to much sought-after opportunity to splash in a toilet bowl, all without disturbing interference of the above mentioned parent. Neither would he suppress his tendency to crawl out of reach of bothersome ancestors on a pebble beach, so he could comfortably devour small rocks. Under the influence of my netpals - mothers and their socially advanced offspring, we attempt to teach Tom to "wave goodbye" to his daddy who drives off for work, but we only encounter his clueless looks. He waves to grandma quite eagerly -- now I don't know if he concluded that these formalities are redundant among men, or that he's not going to bother to wave goodbye to someone who comes back every night anyway?

This takes us to another peculiar question of our doctor. Does the child use at least two meaningful words (e.g. "mama" or the bloody "bye-bye"). Well, no. Only back at home I figured that I had focused so much on the common mama and bye-bye that I did not recall our daily expressions! His very popular "ahhhM", when I feed him too slowly, and then a satisfied "hhhmmmMMMMM!", when something tastes well. Tommy has his priorities sorted already at young age.

It is a fact that Tom excels in the food area. Since his breast-feeding days he shares with his father a devoted exultation while gazing into our refrigerator, and since he discarded nursing as definitely boring, he shows excitement over anything he is allowed to devour. The doctor thus only praised our advances with food and recommended adding more and more ingredients, until by one year of age Tom could eat "normal" food (acceptable for toddlers, of course). I am afraid Tom understood her quite well.

	Mom put this handy table here so I could *NOT* reach the buttons... but I'm a clever baby!

Since we got back from the exam he insists on eating our food. When he was grabbing for my cereal bowl, I finished dried strawberries within and gave it to him empty in good will, so he could play. Our poor undernourished child raked inside with his little fat hand and when he found nothing to grab and put in his mouth, he threw a hysteric fit; similarly, when I removed a french fry from his clutches that he had stolen from my plate. The other day he tore away from his loving mother's arms (where I was comforting him from previous crying), only to express his affection to grandma -- or more precisely, towards an APPLE she was eating.

The grandest scene he has made so far, occurred at our favorite sushi restaurant. Naively, I fed Tom with mush before we left and took along a bowl full of his favorite cheerios, plus another bowl with skinned grapes. At the restaurant, Tom sat comfortably in his own chair (here I would like to commend myself for such a good buy -- restaurants offer baby seats, but here I can put food on a small table in front of him, and it's our - washed - table). I dispensed a few cheerios so he would not be bored. He devoured them in a split second, and fixated his gaze on the bowl. He got another load... then another... then the grapes... and more... etc. Before we even received our own soup, Tom's bowls were frighteningly empty. Sid accused me of abusing our child through starvation, and ran out to the nearest drugstore to buy something to eat for our junior. He was not very successful -- we are not fully trained yet, and the cereal he bought turned out to be heavily sweetened, hence I refused to pass it to my desperate child. Fortunately for us, they brought us our sushi dinner. I peeled off some dry rice from one of my rolls, which Tom promptly ingested and began to crawl determinedly up my arm in which I was holding the rest of the serving. He got a piece of avocado, then more (rice and avocado) from the next roll, etc. I suffered multiple scratches on my arm and my Japanese dinner became leftovers after my baby. Finally, it dawned on us: NO ONE SHALL EAT WHILE THE BABY HAS NO ADEQUATE FOOD IN FRONT OF HIM.

	I ate this much blackberries! Tom has sorted his priorities for some time now.

Should you have the impression that our lives revolve around our Omnivore baby, you are only partially right. Naturally as a first-born, Tom is carefully monitored, recorded, photographed, and admired. However, we direct similar attention to our continually ailing Wagon, which has been insisting to finally enter its vehicular retirement. Cecilia stays relatively problem-free, but that is mainly because while twice as old, it traveled hardly half the distance that our "tripping" car had. Right now, the biggest problem with Cecilia is its size. We bought it in a hurry, back when I just arrived to America, thinking of it as a temporary solution for a year or two. Cecilia was to fulfill a function of a shopping car for a housewife. Our vague prenuptial plans counted with upgrading to a larger vehicle as needed with arrival of children. But there's no free lunch here; we bought a house, then I lost my job, then came Tom - we were somehow never "ready" for a new car. I thought that Sid would take over Cecilia and I with Tom would keep the Wagon (which has air bags and ABS and a four wheel drive and central locking and other amenities of a relatively newer car), but I hit an obstacle. To be more precise, Sid actually hit it -- with his head on the ceiling inside Cecilia. Simply put, my Hippo won't fit in Cecilia, and when he get in anyway, the whole setup looks like a cartoon.

And so we keep longingly watching for any upturn on price of shares of Sid's employers. Sid sometimes receives options as bonus -- but as the price keeps dropping, they are mostly under water. Please understand -- we planned to re-invest money from the option into our home's equity, lower our mortgage payments (while growing the portion of our home that we actually own), which in turn would afford us a car loan. Alas, the situation looked unsatisfactory, long-term.

All this got disrupted by our bank, where we got our mortgage, who offered us a better loan rate. Now we are again swimming in paperwork and phone conversations and comparative loan shopping, just like two and half years ago, when we were buying the house. Appraisals, tax returns for past two years, payroll stubs etc. I think that our excitement compares with the one around our home purchase -- dropping one sixth of our payments, which means money in our pockets, will hopefully let us breathe easier. So wish us luck -- perhaps we shall even get a new car in the end!

	Tom, being ill, makes you really feel sorry for him...

Copyright © 2004 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.