Elephants (of the non-pink variety)

This morning I was the parent responsible for dropping off little Rataxes at daycare, and I had the pleasure therefore of administering another first: Rataxes’s first ride in a car seat facing forward. We turned the car seats in both cars around on Sunday, which is something that is supposed to be done either when the child turns one or two years old, depending on whose advice you happen to subscribe to (on Sunday Rataxes was exactly 13 months old but that’s really just a coincidence as we’d been meaning to flip the seats for a while). I think he liked it; not only does he now get to see where we’re going, but the forward-facing configuration also makes it more of a proper seat, with Rataxes’s back straight, as opposed to the backwards set-up which was more of a recumbent baby-in-a-basket deal. I know that I certainly liked it, being able to glance back over my shoulder and see his whole face as opposed to just the top of his head and maybe the set of his eyebrows.

So we made it to daycare without incident and I delivered Rataxes into the arms of one of his beloved providers. Rataxes immediately did one of his new tricks, which involves raising one arm against the side of his head and making a motorboat noise with his lips. I had to translate that what he’s actually doing is “being an elephant” – although what he’s ACTUALLY actually doing is imitating his mother and me being an elephant. The arm raise is supposed to be the elephant’s trunk (with shoulder held close to nose) and the buzzing lips are supposed to be accompanied with a vocal glissando to approximate the trumpeting (after playing trumpet/French Horn for twelve years or so in school I can do a less fanciful mimicry pretty well, but that is oddly exhausting). So Rataxes does the best he can with a copy of a copy. For a while it seemed like he would make that gesture/noise as a way of requesting a specific book featuring elephants to be read to him, but now apparently he just does it for funsies whenever it pops into his round little head.

Of course part of my brain insists on ascribing motive to his random actions, which I know is usually wrong but does amuse me nonetheless. For instance, I was reading him Eight Silly Monkeys (jumping on the bed/one fell off and bumped his head/mama called the doctor and the doctor said/no more monkeys jumping on the bed) and about halfway through it, he started making the elephant noise. This is an elephant-free book from cover to cover … or so I thought. But I very much wanted to believe that Rataxes was trying to tell me that the mysterious doctor on the other end of the phone line with Mama was, in fact, an elephant. Dr. Elephant, I presume, which is kind of awesome if you think about it.

One of my friends once referred to one of his children (in a sincerely affectionate way) as “the best toy ever” and I am definitely coming around to that way of thinking. Very little makes Rataxes as happy as watching me build a tower of blocks or stacking cups, except of course for the moment when he reaches out and swipes at a crucial lower supporting level to bring the whole structure crashing down. This is a variation on a game I used to play by myself as a kid, where I would build an array of impractical roadblocks on the playroom floor and then aim various battery-operated vehicles at said structures and watch the train or tank or whatever smash the walls and towers apart. So really this is not so much a variation as the exact same game, build something and watch something else knock it down, you just substitute “my son” for “He-Man’s Attack Trak”.


Now if we can just fine tune Rataxes’s sensibilities and get him to understand that it’s cool to flail your arms and send building blocks flying all around during playtmie, but it’s not cool to flail your arms and send chunks of lasagna flying all around at dinnertime, we’d be all set.