The Beach

You might think that yelling red-faced at the ocean is something only crazy old men do. You would be wrong.

The first time we sat Noah down at the water's edge last week, his initial reaction was glee. The waves splashed against his legs and he couldn't get enough of it.

Then, he literally couldn't get enough of it: it was low tide falling, and a few waves in a row failed to reach his anchorage in the sand.

He pointed. He grimaced. He shouted at the inexorable sea. He wailed.

He turned toward his mother with a gesture of outrage. Make the waves come back! I want those waves now!

When we actually took him out deep, we knew we had a terminal case. The kid found nirvana. He couldn't have been happier if he'd been eating blueberries with one hand, raspberries with the other, and petting a dog with both. Unless perhaps if he'd managed to wriggle out of his diaper right before that trifecta, the better to pee in mid-air as the dog licked his face.

Noah Accessorizes

Mischief

This blog entry is brought to you by the letters K, Y, P and O, which, in the form of foam cutouts, Noah can now identify on the first go. Also Q, 2, A, and sometimes D. I never would have thought to even quiz him until one day he picked up the letter P and blurted its name. This at a point when he still seemed unaware that a word could have more than one consonant and vowel. I shuddered to think that he was already taking after his father -- 15 months old and more interested in language than in speech.

A short-lived hypothesis. Yesterday Liz carried him upstairs to the diaper table. He squirmed and thrashed. "Noah, I'm just taking you upstairs to get a new dipe," she told him, putting him down to arrange things for the change.

Whereupon he looked at her, stated "Downstairs!," and scrambled through the child gate and back toward the second floor.

Doubtless he had an object in mind. The second floor is where the kitchen trash can is. He has taken to opening the lid and tossing in toy trucks, stuffed animals, blocks, and the aforementioned letters to mix with the cherry pits and corn cobs. When you sign up for parenthood, no one tells you that you'll soon end your evenings by digging through old chicken bones to rescue Donald Duck.

Funny thing about mastering trash can lids: it awakens you to the principle governing toilet seats. The other morning, sometime after the little bandit's 5 o'clock wake-up shout, Liz emptied one of his diapers in the upstairs bathroom. Noah scampered in there behind her, grabbed her hairbrush, threw open the commode, and used the bristles to collect a lovely little dollop of his poop.

Really, it makes eating finger paint seem like an act of true restraint.

Playground Chimes