Woolgathering

There’s an approach to child-rearing which my wife and I both seem to have instinctually gravitated towards. Actually I say “instinctively” but in her case it may be simply because she internalized various bits of child psychology in her undergraduate studies, and in my case it may simply be second-hand observation put into first-hand practice, but regardless, the fact remains that we never really discussed this (as opposed to the many, many discussions about things like “crying it out at bedtime” or “what constitutes eating enough” or “how counterproductive is raising one’s voice” and the like) and yet here we are, both more or less doing it the same way. And what it is, is this: we have always tried to engage the little guy in conversations, since long before he was even capable of forming a single quasi-recognizable word. Of course in those days my wife and I would end up holding up both sides of the conversation, but the principle at play apparently felt right to both of us: establish the form and the substance will follow. If you never speak to a child until the child tries its own first conversational gambit on you, you will be waiting for quite a while. (Also, running the risk of referring to your child as “it”.) On the other hand if you engage in the trappings of a (relatively) sophisticated kind of banter from the get-go, you may very well be surprised at how quickly the child catches up.

And I was, in fact, pleasantly surprised when this happened just yesterday. The little guy has gotten pretty good at talking but by and large the conversations in which he tends to participate the most are the ones that focus on things, real physical things that are present immediately before us in the here and now, like cars and trains and dogs and granola bars. Which is not surprising in the least, of course, since he is the very definition of a little two-legged id who lives entirely in the now. Unless, perhaps, the true definition of living in the now involves somehow overcoming the human experience of tending to dwell on either the past or the future, because the little guy doesn’t have a shred of that to overcome … or so I thought. Because, according to our guiding principle, my wife and I will consistently offer him opportunities to talk about other ideas, but these are often met with repeated “uh?” noises, as if the little guy knows it’s his turn to speak but isn’t quite sure what sound he’s supposed to make if it’s not expressing one of his wants or naming something in our hand or on the page in a book. If my wife takes the little guy to the pool for a swimming lesson and then later tried to get him to tell me how it was, the only way he can relate something so abstract as what went down in another place and time, outside the house hours earlier in what might as well be another galaxy long long ago, is if Mom provides the words and he simply repeats them.

Again, or so I thought. Yesterday my wife took the little guy to the county fair, which is a pretty big deal in the county where we now keep our primary residence. If our progeny follows in his parents’ footsteps at all he’ll have a 50% chance of being crazy about the rides on the midway and a 200% chance of being crazy about the abominations against sensible eating which are manifest in fair foods, but he’s still a bit young for all that reckless self-endangerment. Livestock, on the other hand, are endlessly fascinating, so most of their time at the fairgrounds consisted of hanging out at the petting zoo. And when I got home from work yesterday evening, my wife recounted their day and left plenty of spaces for the little guy to add to the conversation. As usual, it started with some prompting, my wife asking “Did we see a baby cow?” and the little guy affirming that was the case. Then my wife asked “What else did we see?” And I was waiting for the little guy to say “uh?” because it’s still difficult for him to comprehend that something in the memory part of the brain rather than the current-field-of-vision part of the brain can be the answer …

And the little guy said “Sheep!”

So … milestone? As usual there are so many layers of abstraction here, with me being delighted by the apparent evidence that the little guy has just maybe had an inevitable-yet-significant breakthrough in terms of how he thinks and how he communicates and how he thinks about communicating, that the word “overthinking” scarcely seems to do justice. But I, very unambiguously, thought it was pretty cool.


Also, the county fair petting zoo had a zebu, which is an exotic subspecies of cattle from Asia. That made her dang day.