Twinkletoes

Sometimes I have brief moments when I mentally hear Bill Cosby imitating his father:

"What's wrong with that boy?"

... or, to use a more recent pop culture reference, Hank Hill from "King of the Hill":

"That boy ain't right."

My son likes to mince about. I'm not exaggeratering. He walks about on his tip-toes, taking little half or quarter steps. Sometimes he'll even hold his little hands out to the sides like a ballet dancer. It's almost a textbook definition of mincing. You know Fred Flintstone's bowling technique? Yeah, that.

I'm not a homophobe. I'll love my son without regard to his eventual sexual orientation. It reflects somewhat on North American society, I think, when even a relatively socially liberal and progressive thinking male like I imagine myself to be even thinks about worrying about how his 21-month old son is comporting himself, body-language wise, and how this might relate to future dating habits. I even laugh inwardly when I consider writing about it now, but there you have it; heterosexual men are weird that way (partially for reasons which are explained later in this post).

Daigoro has probably picked up the habit from a rule in his daycare provider's household that the children (there are five) aren't supposed to run indoors. I imagine this is how they skirt around the "not running rule" while still expressing excitement and the appearance of running quickly. (Daigoro obeys the letter of the law, if not the spirit, in this case - as usual) The bouncing, rapid step of his mincing can seem just like running, except abbreviated. I can only guess that it's developed in daycare, since he never seemed to do it beforehand; one can never be sure.

When he's not "mincing", he walks normally of course, but he also has an exaggerated bow-legged walk from time to time, splaying his feet out to double or triple their normal spacing, so that he looks like he's trying to straddle a horse, or at least a Shetland pony. Do I worry about him growing up to be a cowboy? Eating pudding? On Brokeback Mountain?

To be completely honest, his mincing little runs are pretty darn cute. He's almost always excited when he does so, often accompanying his walk with little squeaks and squeals of enthusiasm about whatever it is he's interested in the moment (the cat, a doll, trucks, trains, bathtime, a bowl of cereal, what have you).

When I was in grade school and high school 15-20 years ago, aside from the usual cut-ups and curse words, a very common (altogether too common, I'm afraid) insult was to call someone a "fag" or a "faggot". It was often used jokingly, of course, but to call someone a "fag" and really mean it was meant as a pretty harsh insult. I didn't use the term myself - my parents were very strict about cursing and insults based in intolerance of any sort, and I adopted a similar policy when very young. Unfortunately, listening to teenagers today, it seems not to have diminished in usage. If anything, it seems to be more common.

It's sad, really, to observe a toddler's way of walking about that is purely an expression of joy and excitement and to layer baggage-laden ideas about sexual identity and masculinity onto it. Daigoro is having fun and walk/running in a way that he finds enjoyable. It's ridiculous to apply any sort of value judgement to that behaviour. Is homophobia so ingrained in our society that even social liberals have little pangs at the sight of their son playing with dolls or mincing about?

Short answer is: yes. Now what do I, as a parent, do about it?

I'm doing everything that I can think of to avoid imposing gender roles on Daigoro - I encourage him to be gentle with dolls, I don't flip out when I see him imitating mom while she's putting on make-up, I let him mince to his heart's content.

Yet, entirely without conscious encouragement from me or Marli, he seems to love hockey, trucks, trains, cars, explosions and running into things and knocking them over - classic "guy" things if ever there were some.

One of these centuries, humankind will wake up collectively and realize that all of these barriers we put up, these identities we forge and then so tenaciously defend, are important in one sense - our self-image - but also arbitrary - that men should be able to dance with their hands above their heads if they want to without having to wear pink triangles, and women should be able to wear a crew cut without hearing jokes about comfortable shoes.

Until then, little twinkletoes is mincing about the house. It's probably good for his calves, which will definitely come in handy in rugby.

Who Needs Sleep?

“Who needs sleep?
well you're never gonna get it
Who needs sleep?
tell me what's that for
Who needs sleep?
be happy with what you're getting
There's a guy who's been awake
since the Second World War”

Who Needs Sleep, Barenaked Ladies, from the album “Stunt”

Yesterday, we slept in. Well, we slept longer than we would normally when waking up with Daigoro, whose usual waking time is 6:30 to 6:45 at the moment. I ended up getting up at 7:45. Sleeping in is a luxury that I think childless people don’t generally appreciate. I know I didn’t. Other luxuries you might not appreciate as a toddler-free adult: being able to concentrate on a task on the computer or on your desk without a small 13 kg human plunking him or herself in your lap; being able to leave scissors, markers, medicine and cleaning products anywhere you like; being able to just go out and do something outside the house without a) finding someone to take care of said toddler or b) going through the 10-15 minute ritual of preparing to go outside the house.

We owed the luxury of a morning of extra sleep (my internal clock currently has a unfortunate habit of waking me up at 6:30 even if I want to sleep in, so I currently wake up, go back to sleep, and wake up again a few hours later on these occasions) to the generous offer of my parents to take Daigoro for an evening and the following morning.

Prospective parents, if there is no other reason that you can think of to keep up good relations with your own parents and/or in-laws, this is one you should keep in mind: you will need a break from your child from time to time.

So, thanks to my parents, we had a toddler-free evening and morning. Yay, parents!

Everyone needs different amounts of sleep. I can get by fairly well on about six hours, but I prefer eight. Quality of sleep is important too; I’d rather have six hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep rather than eight hours with one or two episodes of wakefulness. My wife, who has decided to adopt the pseudonym “Marli” for now (it’s a literary reference – more on that later), prefers to have more.

So it came as a bit of a blow to both of us in the weeks and months following Daigoro’s birth that we’d be waking up two or three times in a night. Not that we didn’t expect it, mind you, but expecting and experiencing are two different things. This made for a very unpleasant time for both of us, more so for Marli than for me, since Daigoro was exclusively breast-fed. When he was quite young, Daigoro slept in a basinet in the same room with us. Every so often we’d co-sleep (for the non-parents “have the baby sleep in the bed with the parents”) which was easier in terms of getting the baby to the breast, but harder in terms of space in the bed. Even in a queen-sized bed, a baby can be tricky to accommodate.

I valiantly offered to sleep in the room for as long as I could as a show of solidarity, but Marli quickly pointed out that it was pointless for both parents to be poorly rested just for the purposes of moral support (I was working), so she suggested I sleep on the sofa. I took up the offer guiltily, but not without some relief. If there are some aspects of “hellishness” to parenting, certainly months of sleepless nights range into that territory. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Eraserhead” by David Lynch, the nightmarish wailing of the grotesque “child” in that film comes deliriously close to reality after waking up three or four times in the night for the seventh consecutive night.

Ray Bradbury, one of my favourite science-fiction/fantasy writers, once lyrically described 3 AM as the “midnight of the soul”. Surely I have felt more desperate at 3 AM than at almost any other hour of the day, but never more so in the first five months of Daigoro’s infancy.

After Daigoro had settled his sleep patterns enough that he was only getting up twice a night, we moved him into a crib in the spare bedroom. The deal was that I would get up, get him from the crib and bring him to the bed, where Marli would feed him. If you are keen on zombie films, you will have a good mental picture of my usual gait on those bleak evenings in the spring and summer of 2005. On the plus side, I did develop an excellent ability to walk around in the dark without turning on lights, which I’m sure will come in handy in any potential future careers as cat burglar or celebrity stalker.

Daigoro was feeding every three hours or so, which meant that Marli would give him a feeding just before he went to sleep at 8 PM, another at 11 PM, then again at 2 AM and 5 AM. This became fairly routine as time went on. Eventually, we were able to cut out the 2 AM feeding, and at six months (or was it eight? I can’t honestly remember at the moment), we applied the Ferber method fairly rigorously to allow him to go to sleep on his own and also sleep through the night. It was four days of fairly difficult periods of crying and thrashing (and that was just the parents), but in the end, it was well worth it. Daigoro fell asleep on his own, and largely stayed asleep through the night and has been able to do so ever since.

Looking back, it seems a little wimpy to be complaining today about having to get up at 6:30 in the morning when, for a long period, we were sleeping an average of 4-6 hours a night with at least two interruptions, and often more. The human mind has an amazing capacity to forget adversity. It’s a good thing; we’d probably have a lot fewer parents in the world.

We’re about to do the whole thing over again with Baby #2. I should start banking sleep now.

I need sleep.

Mushmouth

Say what you will about his recent (alleged) indiscretions or how his work has gone downhill over the years, in his heyday, Bill Cosby was a comedic genius. My father had a lot of vinyl records of various comedy sets that Cosby did (his tamer, family-friendly ones, at least) and I spent a lot of time just listening to them with headphones on, laughing away to myself at the antics of the Fat Albert Gang playing "buck buck" or the Chicken Heart which ate New York City (if you haven't heard that one, pick up a copy of "Wonderfulness" sometime).

A little less entertaining was Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" show, a pleasant enough animated series featuring some of the characters from the old Fat Albert Gang plus a few new ones. One of the many eccentric characters in that series was "Mushmouth", a gangly speech-challenged kid who spoke in a strange gibberish language apparently called Ubbi Dubbi.

Daigoro is currently going through a "Mushmouth" phase. It's not exactly "Ubbi Dubbi" of course, but it's reminiscent of the same sort of gibberish. For example:

Me: "Daigoro, how are you today?"

Daigoro: "Train eshawna bayja wassa dursha train?"

Me: "Is that so? You want a train?"

Daigoro: "Ashla sho shasha truck unpalla shaw juice? Okay, mahi sholla nishaa kitty?"

Me: "Oh, something about the truck and juice and kitty?"

Daigoro (emphatic): "Yes." (nods head) "Sholla dursha ma shasha truck insh shasha truck rana shisha truck."

Now, this may sound like gibberish, but it's apparent (or at least it's a good fake) that Daigoro thinks he knows what he's saying. I haven't read or learned about child development enough to know what this is called, but I'm sure it's normal (it's pretty cute to boot). It's also apparent that Daigoro has a bit of a truck fixation, but that's another story.

When you think about it, it's pretty amazing that children can pick up speech at all. Of course nearly everyone does it naturally (some developmentally challenged children and other mental and physical impairments being obvious exceptions) - we're evolutionarily hard-wired for it. Take a moment to think about it, though. How many thousands of words do you know now? How many did you know, even as a young child? Think about how complex a concept even simple-to-say words like "love" or "afraid" can represent.

Right now, Daigoro strings together words like beads on a string of (apparently) meaningless syllables. What do those syllables mean to him, if anything? Or are they just practice, to give his tongue and his brain's speech centre the workout they need to wrap themselves around doozies like "she sells sea shells", "The sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick" or (many years from now, hopefully) "pheasant plucker".

I had a slight speech impediment when I was young - it was hard for me to get through certain words. Even today, I have to concentrate a little to say the word "synthesize". Speech is an amazing gift - not available to everyone. Fortunately, communication, in some form or another, usually is. Even as I smile a little inwardly at Daigoro's humorous "mushmouth" phrases, I have to marvel a little at the astounding complexity of human communication.

War and Peace

"Daigoro, no more trains," I say firmly, turning off the computer, where I have been showing Daigoro short amateur videos of model train sets.

"No. Please?" he says pleadingly.

"No more, Daigoro. All gone," I assert, trying to sound as benignly authoritative as I can.

His face crumples and his lip quivers.

"Trains? Dada? Dada? Trains?" his tone is more demanding now, with an edge of desperation.

I stand up. He's been sitting on my lap watching YouTube videos of cars, trains, firetrucks and other fossil-fuel guzzling metal behemoths for about 10 minutes. We're trying to limit his combined television and computer intake to less than an hour or two a day; less if possible. I cradle him in the crook of my arm as I step away from the computer.

The waterworks begin.

"No no no nononono," he cries. He cracks an eye open briefly to see if I'm paying attention. I set my mouth in the now-standard "I'm sticking to my guns" expression.

"You've had enough trains. Time to go brush teeth," I say hopefully. This never ends well.

"No! Nooooo," he wails, then he starts up with the open-palmed smacks on the sides of my face. I'm secretly glad he hasn't learned to ball up his little mitts into fists. On the other hand, those little baby fingernails are surprisingly sharp. It's a good thing he doesn't know how to scratch yet either, but occasionally he gets an accidental swipe.

As an aside, both my wife and I are believers in the "firm but fair" model of parental authority. State what you're going to do, then follow through. If you make a rule or a schedule, you stick to it. No buckling, no appeal to the other parent. We intend to put up a solid front of parental authority.

That's the plan, anyway.

I grasp his hands firmly. To his credit, he's gotten a lot better with the hitting - I raised my voice on one occasion enough to make him think twice about smacking me since.

"No hitting," I say simply.

He promptly tries to head-butt me. I'll hand it to him, he's both a master of improvisation and knows how to take advantage of legal loopholes. Fortunately, he's tried this trick before and I know to dodge the first attempt. The first few times... well, I've seen stars.

I transfer my right hand from his hands to stop his head from impacting forcefully into my left eye.

"No headbutting either," I warn. "Headbutting" as a word-concept is probably aiming a little high, but no harm in naming names.

Thwarted, he sobs a few times, tries arcing his back somewhat half-heartedly, then resigns himself to being carried into the bathroom. I've won this battle. The war goes on.

It's strange to deal with the immediacy of toddler violence. With adults, you don't just wind up and smack someone when you can't get what you want. Well, not without landing in any number of psychiatric institutions or prisons, anyway. It's primal, direct and, in a way, quite understandable. How else do you communicate your extreme displeasure to a giant twice to three times your size and seven or eight times your weight who also happens to be ignoring your limited efforts at communication?

Bringing up children can sometimes seem like a series of skirmishes or running battles. Especially when it involves actual physical tantrums like this one. Fortunately for babies and toddlers (and the humanity of parents in general), we don't retaliate with force ourselves.

It's hard to reconcile a 13-kilogram ball of angry toddler with the very image of peace and tranquility that Daigoro radiated in his first few days with us. A little swaddled reddish-pink creature, weighing 3.85 kilograms and looking like a cross between a wizened chimpanzee and a giant mutant pink slug (yes, newborn babies are beautiful, but it's a different kind of beautiful), he nonetheless was quiet... and largely immobile. Among the many things I am looking forward to with our second child is the lovely prospect of having a newborn baby remain in the same place after you put it somewhere; toddlers having an uncanny ability to remain anywhere but where you last saw them.

I've heard many parents comment that in the first day or two, a newborn is very quiet (or at least, by comparison to a week or so later) - a few squawks and coos, but mostly very peaceful. My wife reliably informs me that this is largely due to the fact that the baby is more or less exhausted from the ordeal of being born (and let's face it, if you were squeezed through an opening not much larger than your head, you'd take a few days to recuperate too). Tired or not, it also makes for a very convenient survival trait. If the already grumpy and tired parents had a preview of what kind of noise that little "bundle of joy" would make in the months and years to come, they might just reconsider their sacred role.

The peace of the newborn - enjoy it while you can, new parents... it's the calm before the storm.

Enter Daigoro

(Note: If you're reading this blog for the first time, be sure to read the inaugural post, "The (Little) Middle Way" first)

What (or more accurately, who) is Daigoro?

Daigoro was the name of the fictional character Kozure Okami's son, who accompanied him in his epic adventures across Feudal Japan. I've chosen to use Daigoro as a pseudonym for my son - it's an obvious choice given my choice of nickname.

This Daigoro, my Daigoro, entered into this world in the early hours of the first week of April, 2005. My wife (who as yet lacks a pseudonym and will thus go nameless for the time being) had convinced me of the benefits of a home birth, and we had planned together for the event. Being a first time father, I was nervous, of course, but I was also well prepared by the patient and well-informed coaching of my wife, who has quite a bit of knowledge in childbirth from her medical-related education.

While she had been experiencing symptoms of early labour since that morning, she was convinced that she had some time yet to wait even as I arrived home from work around 6:30 that evening. We had taken a short course in so-called "self-hypnosis", a method of inducing a trance-like state which assisted in reducing both the perception of pain and making time seem to go by more quickly when feeling discomfort. It's actually a none-too-complex method, but it requires practice and preparation.

I suggested that she should being the early steps of going into a light state of self-hypnosis so that once labour began in earnest, she'd be prepared, but she declined, thinking she had plenty of time yet. She even went so far as to start doing laundry. By 9:30, though, she realized that perhaps this was proceeding a little faster than she expected and we paged the midwives. I believe they arrived sometime around 10:30, but my recollection of events is somewhat skewed.

Things proceeded quickly after that. The midwives were wonderful and my wife was brave (albeit understandably unreasonable at times) and my son was delivered without drugs (the term "natural childbirth" always seems a little snobbish to me) shortly before 3 AM. I am proud to say that I had enough of my wits about me to be in a position to "catch" the baby - as he emerged, he was cradled in my hands first.

Perhaps in some future post, I'll try to better capture the details of the birth, but it was first and foremost a whirlwind experience. I can barely remember details - helping my wife, comforting her, trying to play host to our midwives - it all seemed to happen so fast. One thing I will always remember, however, is the moment of pure joy as I held my son for the first time and wrapped him in blankets to give to his mother.

As it happened, we had been expecting a girl. During a routine ultrasound, my wife overheard the technician describing "girl parts" in medical lingo that my wife could understand. So, as the baby emerged and I saw that it was a boy, I was both happy for the health of a new child, but also surprised that it would be a son and not a daughter.

I suppose it is somewhat of a throwback in today's society to want a son as your first born, but I would be dishonest to say I wasn't hoping for one. Patrilinear primogeniture is a sexist concept, but it dies hard in the male mind.

Despite it being a relatively fast labour, it understandably left my wife quite drained. We bustled about for a little while, made a few phone calls and after thanking the midwives, we tumbled into bed. Thus ended Daigoro's first night on earth.

Since I'm starting this blog belatedly about 21.5 months into Daigoro's development, I'll have to bounce back and forth between current accounts of him and what happened in the past. I hope you will forgive me any temporal confusion this may create.

Daigoro today is a healthy and vigorous young toddler, with a wry, scrunched up smile and a ready laugh. His eyes, sometimes describes as "snapping black" are indeed so dark brown as to be nearly black. He has a mop of wavy light brown hair when it hasn't been cut short (as his mother prefers) and is pretty average-sized for a child his age. He is long-bodied and short limbed, like both his parents, and though not quite stocky, he is certainly solidly built. His current speed settings seem to be "running" and "running faster" but if he interested in something, he will sit down to contemplate it quite thoroughly.

While generally quite happy and pleasant, he also has a meditative and contemplative nature at times, looking very serious when he beetles his lightly toned eyebrows and simply gazes about curiously.

His passions are currently trucks, cars and trains, a trait which I imagine he shares with 80% or more of North American boys. His first word was "shoe", learned because he so enjoys going outside; putting on his shoes meant going there. His current vocabulary is thus (rendered here in no particular order other than the ones that spring first to mind, and by no means comprehensive):

shoe, car, mommy, mom, momma, dada, daddy, kitty, bib, cookie, no, down, up (sometimes up and down get reversed), outside, door, open, hockey, stick, broken, doggie, gi-chan (Japanese familiar term for "grandfather"), truck, plane, train, come, please, thank-you, welcome, juice, water, key, pooh, bama (banana), cracker, cookie, yes (also "yup" and "yeah"), ow, bath, wet, ball, go, one-two-three (said mostly by rote when "counting" something, not always actually related to the number being counted and often restarted), pizza (well, "pida", but close enough), bread, toast, jam, cereal, apple (applies to all round, reddish or red-orange fruits), orange, sock, fish(y), cow, horse, pig, chicken, bird, play, dance, snow, cold, hot, baby, treat(s), tree, wheee, okay, tee (TV), pooh (as in the bear, not the body function), light, diaper, corn, book, jacket, pants, shirt, mitten(s), bike + various names of family members and fellow homecare children.

There are a number of other words he seems to understand without necessarily being able to repeat them to us - our instruction to be "gentle" for example. Taking a moment to write down these words, it's interesting to note what he's learned and what he hasn't learned by this point.

In some cases ("thank you", "please"), I'm quite happy he's learned the words. In others ("pooh", "tee"), I'm not quite as proud.

No one said this path would be easy.

The (Little) Middle Way

"...These two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.

"Avoiding both these extremes, the Tathagata (the Perfect One) has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nibbana. And what is that Middle Path realized by the Tathagata...? It is the Noble Eightfold path, and nothing else, namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration."

Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (The Discourses of Buddha)

Ah, the inaugural post. Without presuming to sound too pompous or self-aware, it's probably best to jump right into things and avoid the usual blather about why one is starting a blog and what one went through to do it, or what one hopes to accomplish with it. In some sense, this is inevitably belly-gazing, but perhaps it can transcend that state and become something more.

What point is there is starting a blog with a quote from Buddha? I'm not a Buddhist - I'm not even well-versed in Buddhism, aside from various concepts picked up here and there from University courses in eastern religion and reading about bushido. The quote above reflects a few things about the name of this blog "Between Heaven and Hell" and its Japanese-inspired internet address: kozure-tengoku-to-jigoku.blogspot.com

Tengoku is the Japanese word for "heaven". Jingoku is the Japanese word for Hell. As far as I can make out, my chosen internet alias of Kozure translates roughly as "with child" or "accompanying a child". It's a fragment of the name "Kozure Okami", itself a pseudonym of Itto Ogami, a character in a Japanese graphic novel series (more on that later). Kozure Okami is known more commonly in the west as "Lone Wolf and Cub" and is one of my favourite works of graphic literature.

As it happens, Tengoku to Jigoku is also the title of a Kurosawa film whose title is usually translated as "High and Low" in English, though I had no awareness of the film until I started trying to think of names relating to Heaven and Hell.

This blog is about the trials and rewards of bringing up children. In my case, specifically a young boy of (currently) 21 months, who will go by the alias "Daigoro", and another child who is due to be born (God-willing) in early April. When thinking about this concept, I considered how many people throughout the history of the world have encountered this utterly mundane and unremarkable, yet sometimes also transcendent and unique experience. How many billions have had exactly this experience? What right do I have to write about it?

Well, the simple answer is that I have as much right as any other. The trick is lending a unique, or if not unique, at least interesting perspective. This blog will be about the highs and lows of parenthood - the Heaven and Hell aforementioned, while acknowledging the commonality of the experience - what is between Heaven and Hell? Everything that we can experience and value as human beings.

The title also reflects a little bit of exaggeration on my part. Certainly I haven't experienced anything so trying as to term it "hellish" thus far in 21 months of raising my son. Fortunately, I have been lucky enough to have moments of pure delight - as close to heaven as one can reasonably expect. So, the name of the blog reflects a bit of my sense of humour about the whole affair - translating something ordinary and low-key into something exceptional and epic.

Mostly this blog comes about as a result of me noticing how quickly tiny landmarks of child development pass - winking in and out in the space of a few days - and aside from pure memory and the occasional photograph, no record of these precious moments exists.

This blog, written somewhere between Heaven and Hell, records these sometimes challenging, frequently wonderful, but always fleeting moments. I thank you for joining me on this journey.