Baby boy

December 2, 2010 at 5:01 am | Posted in Little O, Massholes | 3 Comments

All boy…

My baby boy is 10 months old today. Here is what he likes to do:

Crawl up stairs and try to crawl down them, backwards
Eat rice crackers (Baby Mum Mums)
Steal his sister’s ellie
Pull his sister’s hair
Talk and coo
Yell in his highchair
Take things in and out of containers, such as baskets
In the middle of playing, crawl up to you and try to climb up your leg for a snuggle
Then, immediately after a quick hug, dive for the floor so he is free again
Wake up at 10:30 p.m. for one final feed (we seemed to have solved the sleeplessness!)
Wake up WIDE AWAKE at 5:30 a.m.
Stick his hand in the toilet
Pull all the toilet paper off the roll
Stick his fingers in sockets
Open bureau drawers and then shut his fingers in them
Dance in his mother’s arms
Put small things in his mouth
Bang his favorite toy, the remote control, on his sister’s head or other nearby surface

When we found out we were having a boy, I cried a little bit. Not because I didn’t want a boy. (Of course, I just wanted a healthy baby, of course.) I cried because I just didn’t know I wanted a boy because I didn’t know about boys. I am one of three girls. As my husband points out often when I can’t take his ribbing, I grew up without a great deal of male influence. (My childhood home was full of floral prints and art supplies and girls’ lacrosse sticks and was short on dirt and trucks and baseball bats.) Now I have a daughter. My entire frame of reference for loving a child was loving a girl — and, oh, how I loved her. How could I ever love another baby as much as Little Bug? What if I couldn’t? What if I had that little baby boy and I looked at him in the hospital and didn’t love him as much? At the time I told myself that, were this the case, it might be because he was a boy and not because this was probably a very common feeling before having a second child.  “As soon as this baby is born he is going to own you,” my husband promised me. My friend Rebecca, whose first child was a girl and second a boy, understood in a way to which I could relate a little more immediately. “If you’re bummed about the pink clothes and dresses,” she assured me, “just think: you can dress him like a cross between Prince William and John-John.”

My husband was right, of course.  The end of Little O’s birth was quick and slightly dramatic, and from the second I knew he was going to be fine, he did own me. I would like not to play to stereotypes of gender and birth order, but this kid is easy-going, rough-and-tumble, and unbearably sweet. He is trying to take his first steps and of course I am already nostalgic for his ever-too-quick babyhood. But I also cannot wait to see where he’ll take off running and what he’ll say when those coos and babbles turn to words.