Aug
11
18 month state of the union
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Lately we’ve been taking the boys to a nearby college campus which is 1) satisfyingly empty after hours with tons of areas to explore, and 2) teeming with small cottontail rabbits—they’re everywhere; in the wooded trails, hopping across the parking lots, contentedly gnawing grass in the common areas. On Sunday I loudly asked, “Who wants to go see the bunnies?” and from the corner of the room behind a pile of Legos, a tiny voice peeped, “Me.”
Oh, Dylan. I can hardly believe it, but he’s a year and a half old now. A toddler! One who can talk. Using words. My god.
At eighteen months, Dylan is obsessed with animals and the noises they make. Particularly the cow (MOOOO), the sheep (AHH), the cat (MOW!), the owl (HOO. HOO.) and the horse (MOOOO) (?). He loves books featuring pictures of animals and is constantly clambering into our laps, saying “Book! Book!” and insisting on yet another team viewing of My Giant Book of Farm Porn or whatever it is.
His language has been exploding lately and he’s so strainingly eager to communicate. When I get home from work, or open his bedroom door in the morning, he shouts “Mama! Mama!” before pointing to every recognizable object nearby: “Fish! Dada! ‘Orse! Ball!” Woe be unto you if you do not acknowledge these namings with the proper enthusiasm, for he will simply repeat ‘orse, ‘orse, ‘ORSE, ‘ORSE until you shout YES! Yes! That IS a seahorse, right there on the cover of that book about . . . seahorses. Holy fucking SHIT, Dylan!
Some of his frequently-used non-farm-animal words that come to mind: Mama, Dada, ball, noo noo (macaroni), up, down, baba, more, song, star, water, walk, outside, inside, shoes, socks, Riley (I don’t know how to spell the way he pronounces this, but its meaning is unmistakeable), hot, all done, night night, light, cookie, cracker, waffle, car, truck, baby. The words he can say are nothing compared to what he can understand, which I tend to forget until I do something like quietly ask JB if I should put the farm video on and Dylan cocks his head before heaving himself onto the sofa and pointing at the television. “More! More!”
He watches his brother with squirrel-bright eyes and wants to do everything Riley does, which is both awesome and horrifying. They cackle and conspire together. They plot ways to break bones and shatter household objects. Their favorite game is to violently pogo up and down on the living room couch, screaming and laughing, while I flap and squawk as uselessly as a mother hen.
Dylan is terrified of the vacuum cleaner, but in other areas of life seems to be fearless to the point of reverse Darwinism. He beelines for the nearest physical catastrophe with an unerring sense for what will give me the strongest heart palpitations, and just when I think he’s surely starting to get the hang of this self preservation business, I find him precariously balancing on the top of his toy car, grinning widely while it begins to roll out from under his feet.
This weekend I suddenly realized I didn’t know where he’d disappeared to and I began walking through the house saying, “Dylan? Dylan! DYLLAANN!” over and over, peering in bathrooms and behind bedroom doors, and I kept hearing this bizarre, floating giggle that seemed to come out of the air, and I couldn’t find him and I couldn’t find him and I kept hearing the giggle and I finally shouted in sheer desperation, like someone in a horror movie, “DYLAN, WHERE ARE YOU?” and suddenly I saw him from where he had climbed into his stroller and was hiding in the seat. “Hee hee hee,” he said, his eyes crinkled nearly shut with the fun of it all.
He has the most stubborn cowlick in the world, a perfect representation of his resistant nature, and his recent haircut protests were surely audible from space a few days ago. Oh, he is a furious little sniglet when he wants to be, stomping around throwing things and pulling books off the shelf and biting the furniture and strangest of all, vengefully cramming dog hair in his mouth when he’s mad.
His moods are like summer storms, though, and as quickly as the black clouds roll in they’re gone, and his good humor shines through once more. And he’s off: to gallop at top speed while yelling “AAHHHHH!”, to steal one of my shoes and drag it around the house, to pound all the annoying buttons on Riley’s battery-powered Buzz Lightyear (“Zurg will—Zurg will—Zurg will—Zurg will never see this coming!”) to grab the dog’s Frisbee and try his level best to throw it for her.
He is, at times, a most colossal pain in the ass; he can be frustrating and exhausting and a challenge of near-Everest proportions. But oh, this boy. He is so funny, so pure, such a delicious pie-slice of life. He is a lovebug who can’t get enough affection, he wants to be held and kissed and carried from place to place. “Up , up!” he says, holding his little hands high, then cuddles straight into my chest, rolling his arms underneath his body as if burrowing right into me. I can’t get enough of this determined, intentional love, so much stronger than a baby’s needful contentment. I can’t believe there will ever come a time when he’s too big to fit in our arms.
Aug
10
That which doesn’t kill you
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This weekend I went to a triathlon training class and as I mentioned before I had some apprehensions ahead of time about the open water part. Well, I had “some” apprehensions until I read Jenny’s comment and when I got to this: “My swimming in open water fear is that I am going to brush limbs with a corpse that someone has murdered and dumped into the water and that my motions will cause it to look at me . . .” I think it’s safe to say I had a “massive amount” of apprehension, like a Do They Make a Swim Diaper For Adults level of apprehension, because holy jesus, I can imagine that scenario with HIGH DEFINITION CLARITY. Like that scene in the Abyss where they’re exploring that sunken submarine and that one dead body sort of floats into view and a goddamned crab crawls out of his open dead mouth BLAAAAAHHHHRRGGH.
Anyway, it turns out that the section of Lake Washington off Madrona Park we were swimming in contained no sharks, submerged watercraft, or softly rotting corpses, but there was an awful lot of what everyone referred to as “milfoil”, which is, as far as I’m concerned, a fancy name for “creepy-ass seaweed”. I don’t know what it is about underwater plant life, but I am not a fan. I don’t like touching it, I don’t like seeing it, I don’t like knowing it’s sitting down there all slimy and swaying back and forth and just . . . lurking, possibly hiding things like fish and zombies and who knows what all.
The worst was when we swam out around the dock and the milfoil was visible below but the water was deeper, so looking down through my goggles I could see a forest of it several feet below me. REACHING UP OH MY GOD. Or maybe the worst was when we were swimming in the more shallow areas and it actually tangled in my arms like it was trying to pull me down and digest me, I’m not sure.
I kind of got over the Plant Fear once they had us do a simulated race start, because I was far too distracted by the unique experience of trying to swim in a group of a hundred or so people. I can barely swim as is, and it was definitely scary to be in a thrashing environment of waves, kicking legs, and flailing arms. I instantly inhaled half the lake up my nose and forgot everything I’ve learned about form and breathing, and we were all supposed to swim about 350 yards out to a buoy and back and oh my god it looked SO FAR. The clinic had loaner wetsuits and I was wearing one with full sleeves, which helped with my buoyancy, but it was really hard to move my arms and I felt panicked and exhausted almost immediately. I kept alternating between a weak freestyle and a frantic dog paddle, my goggles got all fogged up and gave me a claustrophobic feeling, and for most of the swim I could not regulate my breathing and more than once I flipped onto my back just to hyperventilate and try to calm down. Towards the last 50 yards or so I managed to get my shit back together and stop behaving like a harpooned seal and stroke my way back to shore, and at that point I was thrilled to see that stupid milfoil because it meant I was almost there, thank GOD.
Not my finest moment, but I’m glad I did it, because 1) I have a better idea of what to expect in the triathlon now, and 2) I may have felt like a complete clusterfuck out there but I didn’t give up and turn around (even though I wanted to so, so bad) and I finished somewhere in the middle or final third of the crowd. My goal for this race is simply to finish it in one piece, not beat some particular time, but no one wants to be last, you know?
I was also happy to see that I’m not the only one wigged out by the swimming component of the race. During one of the presentations a trainer asked the crowd if there were any reasons we could think of that could cause panic during the swim, and I murmured, “Is there any reason NOT to panic?” and several nearby women chuckled appreciatively and then we had a lively discussion about seaweed zombies.
Every week, lately, I’ve been doing something that scares me: swimming, running after biking, signing up for intimidating-sounding classes, wearing sausage-tight clothing that displays every detail of the topography of my ass. I keep thinking how this race has grown to represent something much bigger to me than the sum of its parts. How five years ago, I would never have been able to believe my life today. And where I want to be, in five more years.
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