months, or even earlier if it’s their first baby.
What happens is that one day the baby is holding a little plastic car, trying to get it all the way into his mouth, and he makes some typical random baby sound such as “gawanoo,” and the parents, their brains softened from inhaling Johnson’s Baby Oil fumes, say to each other: “Did you hear that? Teddy said ‘car’!!!!!” If you’ve ever been around young parents going through this kind of self-delusion, you know how deranged they can get:
YOU: So! How’s little Jason?
PARENT: Talking up a storm! Listen!
JASON: Poomwah arrrr grah.
PARENT: Isn’t that incredible!
YOU: Ah. Yes. Hmmm.
PARENT: I mean, 13 months old, and already he’s concerned about restrictions on imported steel!
YOU: Ah.
JASON: Brrrrroooooooooooooooooper.
PARENT: No, Jason, I believe that was during the Kennedy administration.
Eventually, your child will start to learn some real words, which means you’ll finally find out what he’s thinking. Not much, as it turns out. The first words our son, Robert, said were “dog” and “hot,” and after that he didn’t seem the least bit interested in learning any more. For the longest time, our conversations went like this:
ME: Look, Robert. See the birds?
ROBERT: Dog.
ME: No, Robert. Those are birds.
ROBERT: Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.
ME: Those are birds, Robert. Can you say “bird?”
ROBERT (emphatically): Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.
ME (giving up): Okay. Those are dogs.
ROBERT: Hot.
Sometimes we’d think we were making real progress on the language front. I remember once my wife called me into the living room, all excited. “Watch this,” she said. “Robert, where’s your head?” And by God, Robert pointed to his head. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what a genius we had on our hands. Then my wife, bursting with pride, said, “Now watch this. Robert, where’s your foot?” Robert flashed us a brilliant smile of comprehension, pointed to his head, and said, “dog.”
Books for One-Year-Olds
The trouble with books for small children is that they all have titles like, Ted the Raccoon Visits a Condiments Factory and are so boring that you doze off after two or three pages and run the risk that your child will slide off your lap and sustain a head injury. So what you want to do is get a book that has more appeal for adults, such as, Passionate Teenage Periodontal Assistants, then cut out the pages and paste them over the words in your child’s book. This way you can maintain your interest while the child looks at the pictures:
YOU (pretending to read out loud): “My, my,” said Ted the Raccoon. “These pickles taste good!” Just look at all those pickles, Johnny! (While Johnny looks at the pickles, you read: “Brad looked up from U.S. News and World Report as a blond, full-breasted periodontal assistant swayed into the waiting room on shapely, nylon-sheathed legs. ‘My name is Desiree,’she breathed through luscious, pouting lips, ‘and if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you how to operate the Water Pik oral hygiene appliance.’”)
Teaching Small Children to Read
Children are capable of learning to read much earlier than we give them credit for. Why, Mozart was only two years old when he wrote Moby Dick!
When our son was about 18 months old, my wife, who has purchased every baby-improvement book ever published, got one called How to Teach Your Baby to Read. The chapter headings started out with “Can Babies Learn to Read?” and worked up to “Babies Definitely Can Learn to Read” and finally got around to “If You Don’t Teach Your Baby to Read Right Now, You Are Vermin.”
Me, I was dubious. I thought it was better to teach our child not to pull boogers out of his nose and hand them to us as if they were party favors. But my wife gave it the old college try. She did what the book said, which was to write words like DOG in big letters on pieces of cardboard, then show them to Robert and say the words out loud as if she were having a peck of fun. She did this conscientiously for a couple of weeks, three times a day, and then she realized that Robert was paying no attention whatsoever, and her I.Q. was starting to drop, so she stopped.
My theory is that there is a finite amount of intelligence in a family, and you’re supposed to gradually transfer it to your children over a period of many years. This is why your parents started to get so stupid just at the time in your life when you were getting really smart.
How to Put a One-Year-Old to Bed
Children at this age move around a lot while they sleep. If we didn’t keep them in cribs, they’d be hundreds of miles away by dawn. So the trick is to put the blankets as far as possible from the child, on the theory that eventually the child will crawl under them.
Bedtime Songs
I advise against “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” because it’s really sick, what with the baby getting blown out of the tree and crashing down with the cradle. Some of those cradles weigh over 50 pounds. A much better song is “Go to Sleep”:
Go to sleep
Go to sleep
Go right straight to sleep
And stay asleep until at least 6:30 A.M.
Potty Training
Child psychologists all agree that bodily functions are a source of great anxiety for children, so we can safely assume this isn’t true. It certainly wasn’t true for our son. He was never happier than when he had a full diaper. We once took him to a department store photographer for baby pictures, and just before we went into the studio, when it was too late to change his diaper, he eliminated an immense quantity of waste, far more than could be explained by any of the known laws of physics. The photographer kept remarking on what a happy baby we had, which was easy for him to say, because he was standing 15 feet away. The pictures all came out swell. In every one, Robert is grinning the insanely happy grin of a baby emitting an aroma that would stun a buffalo. So much for the child’s anxiety.
