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Monthly Column... |
by
Jeff Stimpson
We've discovered another nickname for Ned. "He's our Little Cauldron," Jill says.
Little Cauldron has a temper. I don't know where he got it (he got it from Jill), but he has a will that's prominent enough to render laughable my boss's advice just before he was born, advice that the secret to having two children is remembering that they each have their own personality.
Alex doesn't have tantrums. He doesn't cry hard, in fact, unless we snap at him for doing something wrong. When we do try to get him to do something he doesn't want to do, he cries "Aright! Aright! Aright!", his version of "All right! All right! All right!", which is what we say to him when we get impatient. Jill believes "Aright!" is another way of him saying, "Come around to my way of thinking!" (Alex gets this from Jill.)
Ned doesn't have any words yet. Just as well. What started with a gentle flip of food or toy over the shoulder has deepened. The other day, for example, he was pulling books off the shelf. Unasked, no reason, no reasoning, just that the books were there and so was Ned, and aren't they all going to have to come off those shelves someday anyway? Jill later reported that she called his name once, twice, then again. He finally turned around to look at her.
"No!" she told him. He could see she meant it. He could see his fun was going to end soon, and he started to pull the books down faster.
Little Cauldron used to love the bath. Now he screams and cries. He used to at least pretend to lie still for diapering. Now it's trying to strap an extra-absorbent size six on a mad ferret. "All he wants is for me to hold him: All. Day. Long," Jill says, her shoulders drooped, her eyes red and raw, each word seeming to suck more and more out of her empty tank.
We put Ned in the high chair and he twists, bashing the back of his little skull into the cushioned seat and flinging food as if nobody's starving in India. We used to be able to sit Alex in a high chair for hours. He seemed to like it.
We choose to believe Little Cauldron is teething -- molars, probably. Must be molars. Plus he has a cold. It has to be that.
Otherwise, this is the way Ned is!
"He doesn't understand 'No!'" Jill says. "You just have to pick him up and take him away."
"Ned, you want a bottle?" I asked him last night as I was running through the shopworn tactics of food and stuffed animals to get him to sleep. "You want a binkie?" He's getting older now, and I can't settle him as simply as I used to. He's getting older now, and a lot more coordinated with the swinging forearm. "Ned, you want Big Bully?" Whap with the forearm. "Ned, you want a bottle?" He took the bottle and slurped it dry: his second bottle since dinner (and he's a vomiter). Then, whap. Like a convict flinging an empty milk carton. Fury. This is just like when he first came home and wailed at 2 a.m., while I used to hold him at arm's length in the living room and think how sane, untroubled, and easier Alex was, asleep in the next room.
Absolute fury down there inside Little Cauldron's onesie, binkie flung to crash against the crib railing like a tin cup ricocheting off the bars in the Big House just before the whole prison riots. Lead pipes. Rubber bullets. Helicopters. Fire hoses. Taxpayer money going up in tear gas because somebody was allowed to just go on and on and on-
I use my deep dad voice. "Ned CUT IT OUT!"
The sound yanks him. For an moment, I expect he's pausing before the explosion, that all I've done is put a spark to gas and now boom -- boom boom boom until Jill comes in to chew us both out. Why do kids dig at you as if at a hangnail, picking and pulling and biting until they hit something that makes a light go off?
Ned looks at me. He looks at me. Alex never did that.
"Stop it right now," I add. "Enough's enough!" Enough's enough! used to be one of my mother's. How long since I've thought of that? This feels good. "You settle down and you go to sleep. Period."
That "period" is a capper, but the great dads know when to stop. And Little Cauldron stops, too. He takes Big Bully in his arms and rolls onto his side and makes an earnest effort to go to sleep. All you had to do was tell me, he seems to say.
Later I mention this to Jill. "Yeah," notes Jill, "the pediatrician said were going to have to start disciplining him soon."
I say something about how she's spoiled him from the first minute in the hospital, about how it'd be nice if she told me once in a while what the pediatrician is thinking. I don't hear her answer. My mind is still on that moment when he looked at me and listened to what I had to say.
(P.S. Last night he was up until 1:30.)
Copyright 2001 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
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