It Was A Very Good Year

Almost a year ago, I was having lunch with my friend Barbara when I got the phone call from David – he and Megan were off to the hospital for the birth of our grandson Willem.  We were in Brooklyn last weekend so I can offer a first-hand update on the stellar progress of this remarkable, affectionate, brilliant, charming, exceptional and wonderful baby.

When he was about two weeks old, Megan nicknamed him “The Boss,” as in “I have to get off the phone now – The Boss wants to eat.”  A year later, he is still “His Bossiness” and is more likely to answer to “Hey, Boss” than to “Hey, Willem.”  He has been photographed so much that, when the camera comes out, so does his smile.

Here is what Willem has mastered: speed crawling, playing the guitar, picking up Cheerios off the floor and standing without help. He is also the youngest person to achieve Platinum status with the airlines, having completed ten round-trips, all without buying a single ticket.  Here is what he has not mastered: walking, doing anything with a cup but waving it around, and using a spoon, at least not a spoon with anything in it.  Learning to escape from his crib is at the top of his bucket list.

Willem marks his territory by drooling on couch pillows, piano pedals, carpets, everybody’s shoes, and the laptop, when he can get at it.  He finds satisfaction for the mind and for the mouth in board books like “Going on a Bear Hunt,” “The Subway” and my personal favorite, “There’s a Wocket in My Pocket.”  He has graduated to Size 3 diapers and turned diaper changing into an aerobic exercise for both the changer and the changee. 

So far, he has sampled purple carrots, a variety of fruit and vegetable (???) flavored yogurts, bananas, provolone cheese, bagels, pizza and bacon (thanks to my mother, aka Granny – who else?)  He has graduated from sucking on apple slices to scraping off apple bits with his four and a half teeth.  Willem tried strawberries with such bad results that he will probably wait until he gets to high school to order strawberry pie.  As far as I know, he has not sampled Chicken McNuggets, Steak tartare, Brussels Sprouts or Graeters ice cream.  I also don’t think there were any jelly beans in his Easter basket either.

By the way, at mealtimes, he enjoys background music by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.  He recently discovered that, if you really want to have fun at breakfast, you can lean over the side of your high chair and do the raspberries with a mouthful of Yo Baby yogurt.

Willem’s toys have crowded out most of his dad’s guitar equipment and most of his mom’s photographic equipment.  He has made short work of the houseplants.  His accumulated menagerie of quirky, huggable stuffed animals includes a big yellow duck, a lion, a giraffe, a stegosaurus and a cow with bright pink udders - none of which talks, thank goodness.  He does not own a kid piano, a drum or finger paints although he does have a remote control – without batteries. 

Willem’s clothes are covered with steam shovels, cars, cement mixers, dinosaurs and guitars and his socks have monster fangs on the heels – clearly he is not in touch with his feminine side yet.  He owns half a dozen adorable little pairs of shoes and some Joe Cool sunglasses so he’s ready for a big summer of picking up girls in Prospect Park.

He makes a lot of noises and is headed in the direction of saying important stuff like “Mama” and “Dada.”  “NeNeNeNe” is one of his favorite things to say and I was all set to trade in “Nana” for “Nene” until I remembered that, in the crosswords, “nene” is some sort of a Hawaiian goose.  I decided to pass on being “Nene” because geese are loud and disgusting and I don’t look good in a grass skirt.

Last Friday, we got to see Willem with other kids his age at his weekly music class.  It was lots of fun.  Pete, the teacher played the guitar and led songs and activities with plenty of movement and rhythm.  Pete also collected the musical instruments at the end using two baskets – one for the dry shakers and bells and cymbals and another for the wet ones.  Anyway, we’re not sure if Willem is the most musically gifted kid in the class but he is unquestionably the baldest – ditto for the toddler playground. 

Speaking of the toddler playground, anyone who knew David as a kid or has known Paul at any stage of his life will not be surprised to learn that Willem goes up the slide rather than down. He was as unmoved by a loud “NO” from a little girl with red curls as Dennis the Menace is by Margaret.  At home, Willem is watching for an opportunity to climb inside the dishwasher simply because, like Everest, “it is there.”

So, it has been a busy and exciting year for Willem and for all of us who are watching him grow and change.  It’s impossible to predict what he will experience and accomplish in the coming year although the photos below may offer a hint. By the way, Megan took the first two photos in this post, I took a few and Paul took most of then, including the four at the end of the post.

 

 

 

April Showers Bring . . .

Cincinnati has just finished the rainiest April on record. It barely missed the record for the rainiest month ever, coming in second to January of 1937 when 13.68 inches of precipitation led to the kind of flooding where rowboats were the only way to get around downtown.

What happens when you have an April like this one?  Well, what looks like a mix of coffee with heavy cream is overflowing the Ohio River, the Great Miami and the creek on our golf course. You could easily mistake the soccer and farm fields along our usual bike route for lakes except that they have stands of trees in the middle of them.  When I went to my piano lesson last week, one of my teacher’s neighbors had a pile of rolled up, wet carpeting at the curb.  There were three trucks in her driveway, including one cleaning service van which had a house, whose windows were gushing water, painted on the side.  One of my friends says her house in Mt. Adams is secure; but the hillside, cars and trees across the street are in the process of sliding into her deck and hot tub.

My golf league is headed for a record three weeks straight of cancellations, and it’s too wet to even practice on the driving range.  We played Swamp Golf on Friday afternoon in Oxford with our friends Doug and Joanie, slogging through long grass and mucky, wet goop with alligators and piranhas nipping at our heels.  I lost count of the number of times I used a “hand wedge” to get my ball from deep, impossible rough onto the fairway.

I bought rosemary and basil plants at Kroger’s but, while I was waiting until Mother’s Day to put the basil plants in the ground, they O’Ded on water and some of the stems rotted. Now the plants are drying out in our jacuzzi.  Even the Cirque de Soleil had to cancel performances - since Old Coney Island is under water, its tents are underwater too, although I thought there was a version of Cirque de Soleil that was done in big tanks of water so I’m disappointed at their lack of creativity.

I know food is not supposed to be your emotional support system, and, for an entire month, I have held back the urge to bake and gobble up a large batch of chocolate chip cookies. The other day, however, I did find comfort in a second slice of buttered raisin pumpernickel toast and you can probably guess who did some “mining” for Oreos in the carton of Cookies N’ Cream last week.  Last night, when our neighbors, Tim and Kathy, came over for dinner, she was wearing her old “comfort sweater” and the four of us wrapped ourselves in a cozy cocoon of pasta with red sauce and bacon, chocolate cream pie and two bottles of red wine.

A week ago, my cabin fever got so bad that I organized and filed all of our recent financial statements – a sure sign of desperate boredom.  (I briefly revisited the chocolate chip cookie option but reminded myself that I DO have to fit into my biking shorts for our trip in June.)  Anyway, I discovered that two letters - one with the last four digits of the account number and another with my PIN number - were the only records I had of a money market account I had opened in December. I had visions of my money making laps in cyber space for the next thousand years so I called Capital One – after all, I had plenty of time to do the Press One, Press two routine and sit through obnoxious background music if necessary.

I reached a real person pretty quickly; and she was so nice that, after I described my problem, I told her I was sorry she had had the bad luck to get me.  “Oh, this is easy compared to the last three calls I’ve had,” she said before finding my account, promising not to tell Paul (this kind of thing just fritzes him out) and signing off with a cheery “Stay sane!”  I’m not sure I’m doing a great job in THAT department.

I must also confess that, with too much unsupervised computer time, I found online access to Bookworm, a game I’ve played on airplanes before.  You have to make words out of a whole grid of tiles and you get extra points for using green bonus tiles.  When a red, burning tile appears, you have to use it before it migrates to the bottom of the screen and torches your whole game.  It is educational but highly addictive – you can try it for yourself if with this link http://www.games.com/game-play/bookworm/single/ (Click on Play as a Guest if you don't want to sign in.) Don’t blame me, however, if your dirty laundry gets out of control, your family goes hungry and you wind up with a repetitive motion injury to your wrist.  By the way, Bookworm does accept what David and John used to call “bathroom words.”

Of course, the weather situation could always be worse.  Our roof or our basement could be leaking.  Our house could be under water.  We could be on some noisy, smelly Noah’s Ark with all those green alligators and long necked geese, those humpty-backed camels and those chimpanzees and everything else but unicorns. Hey, all this rain could even be snow.  (See my post, "Snow Day.")  At least, Paul’s perennial garden is as lush and bursting with flowers and buds as it has ever been – even the slacker Clematis, which for years has been my prime nominee as “The Plant Most Likely To Be Ripped Out and Fed to the Compost Heap,” shows signs of flowering.  In addition, Cabana’s, our favorite summertime riverside restaurant where they serve burgers as big as your head, is not underwater.  Their trademark neon palm trees have survived the flooding and are waiting for us, and the sun, to return.