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Pete's Dad Blog Thoughts on being a dad

the transitions of growth

Our family's morning routine goes like this: once we're all ready in the morning, all three of us leave the house together and walk to the street. There, Christina and I kiss goodbye, and we head off in opposite directions: Christina walks to the train which takes her to work, and I take Olive to daycare in the car. We've been doing this consistently every work day since we moved in. Yesterday, Olive decided to get in on the action: I happened to have her in my arms, and after her parents' peck, she threw an arm around Christina's neck and leaned in.

This is a time of very intentional imitation on Olive's part, both physically and verbally. She's more willing than ever to try out a new word or phrase, and the phrases themselves are getting more complex: two-word compounds are routine these days, and she's phasing in an increasing variety of three-word sentences1.

Of course, the purpose to which she directs most of her utterances is to try to get a treat of one sort or another. She's usually the first of us to wake, which means that Christina and I tend to wake up these days not to alarms but to a series of requests: "Snack2", "Tick-tock3", and so forth. It's been hot these last days; this morning, we woke to her request for "Bath!".

Not everything is easy all the time; her increasing ability to specify exactly what she wants leads into the increasing necessity of refusing her requests. It's not reasonable to give her ice cream while we're getting ready to head out for the day, no matter how clearly she requests it. Coping with rejection is a hard thing for any kid, and there are definitely times when Olive just needs to sit down on the floor and scream for a bit about the unfairness of the world. Still, she's starting to understand the reasoning behind the refusals, and consider alternatives. When this morning we told her that she could have a bath this evening, instead of complaining about not getting it right away, she just switched things up and requested a snack instead.

Olive's second birthday is on the very near horizon. Two years ago today, Christina had already been in the hospital for several days4. All our baby books are concluding with sales-pitch handoffs: "buy the next volume for detailed age-specific developmental notes and advice for your child aged 2-6!" We haven't seriously referred to any of the baby books in months. We have not actually bought any of the follow-ons.

My initial inspiration for writing a dad blog was someone else's that I encountered randomly on the internet ages ago, long before I'd ever met Christina. It was cute, and sweet, and written in a style entirely unlike mine. I'd link to it if I could find it, but the actual link is long lost, and I don't have the patience to trawl for it. Its ending stands out for me: in the post for his daughter's second birthday, that guy wrote that he'd started the project as a way to describe the incidents of pregnancy and infanthood, but that time was over. What he had, in his two-year-old, was a young child, with a developing sense of agency. As such, he decided to end the blog there, to protect her privacy as she grew; her childhood memories would be her own, not the net's.

I bring this up to say that I won't be following his lead. It's not just that internet privacy doesn't mean the same thing these days that it did 15 years ago, it's the fun Olive herself will have reading these eventually. My grandfather was a meticulous man, so he printed and archived in binders every email that my dad ever sent him. After he died, we discovered these binders, and had quite a lot of fun as a family reading what my dad had to say to his dad about his small kids: my siblings and I. The thing is, email isn't a great format for that sort of archiving. Blogs kind of are. I want Olive to have the opportunity to read this stuff as an adult5, and it seems unfair to cut off just when things are getting interesting.


1

The first of these, about six weeks ago at a playground, was "Daddy come up!" I could hardly refuse such an invitation, and spent the next several minutes climbing a slide and sliding down it.

2

Olive still a toddler's pronunciation; when she wants a snack, what she actually says is "Nack!" Likewise, when she talks about the bath, it comes out "Bass!"6. She's nicknamed herself by consistently using only the second syllable of her real name, and she has the rest of the kids in her daycare calling her by that nickname. It's a bit idiosyncratic, like "Topher" for a "Christopher", but I'll be a little bit sad on the day she gives up the nickname. Christina, on the other hand, hates it.

3

I think that the plastic electronic "book" which started this one was actually a first birthday present. It's nothing special, just a sturdy thing with three plastic pages and a speaker; when opened to a particular page, it plays a little song characteristic to that page. She particularly enjoyed one of these tunes, whose refrain involved the tick-tocks of clocks of various sizes. Later, Christina found another variant on youtube, which she liked even better. Soon, "tick-tock" generalized from meaning the song, to meaning videos7, to meaning tablet time in general. Tablet time is now one of her favorite things, and its refusal precipitates the majority of the tantrums we see these days.

4

She'd gone in for a routine checkup on the 23rd, and been told that it was critical that she have an immediate induction. They then sat her in bed in the maternity ward, not inducing, for days before actually inducing the birth. This behavior still makes no sense to me.

5

In the event that you, the reader, are Olive as an adult: greetings from the past! Things are dreadfully primitive here, and politics is a nightmare. Why don't you get in touch soon; I'd love to chat with you.

6

I can't say if it is a personal characteristic or something common to toddlers, but Olive doesn't just say things. She declaims, demands, denounces, delights; every utterance is an exclamation. I've marked them all accordingly.

7

These days, Olive also knows how to say "video", which is an entirely different experience from "tick-tock". "Tick-tock" is watching kids' videos, lightly supervised, on her tablet; it's an introvert thing which also gives Christina and I a bit of a break when required. "Video", on the other hand, is watching music videos of real music on the big screen of my desktop while sitting on my lap. It's more musically and visually intense, and it's very much a father-daughter thing. Here's a current favorite.