5/14/2004 » Humor, Photos

My adorable new baby nephew has only one mission in life: ‘How can I get that thing into my mouth?’ He also loves things with wires and things that glow. So when I handed him a mouse with both a cord and—are you sitting down?—a little red light, that combination just blew his little baby mind. After inspecting it, yanking it and gnawing on it, he did what babies always do in the end—he dropped it.

Babies always seem taken by surprise when the things they drop, disappear. They get the Look of ‘Huh?’ and seem slightly wounded. But of course they wouldn’t understand gravity, they’re carried everywhere. And even when they’re sitting, they’re only a foot off the ground.

Through months of similar, painstaking research, I’ve discovered that babies are not like you and me. For one thing, they’re shorter. For another, they have only one hand gesture, a grasping motion. They’ll do it over and over even with things they can’t grab: Mirrors. Water. Beach balls. And eventually they get cranky and demand to be picked up by their poor ol’ uncle. Whose ears and glasses happen to be very grabbable.

On the other hand, babies can do things the rest of us can’t. They can sleep with their short little arms raised like it’s a stickup, they can sleep on their sides with one leg crossed over the other like baby Krishna. They’ll never sleep that way again: they’ll bang their hands, they’ll crush their macadamias.

And babies can consort with their feet as if they were playmates. They pull their socks off, they hold their soles like baby chimpanzees, they put their toes in their mouths and suck on ’em. Enjoy ’em while you have ’em, kid. Once you grow, they’ll be in their own zip code. Poor kid doesn’t know his ticklish little buddies are headed for the Himalayas.

My nephew’s face is tremendously emotive, and when he’s listening intently, you want to believe he understands all. But he opens his mouth, and the illusion is shattered. Grunt, gurgle, gurgle. Lacking a common language beyond facial expressions and grunts, we finally figured out how get my li’l Japanese tourist to eat: I fed him a tablespoon of water, while my helper held some pureed baby food at bay. He would open his mouth, drink some water, and quickly get fed at the same time, a bait ’n switch. After half a bowl, he caught on and exacted messy revenge on my shirt.

After feeding time, I put his diaper-cushioned bum on my head and carry him to the picture window, he loves being seven feet tall. Once, sitting astride my crown, he deliberately crumpled forward like an empty beer can. I looked up—this kid was grabbing fistfuls of my hair and trying to stuff it in his mouth. Other people’s teeth, glasses, bottles of wine—it’s all fair game.

That’s the world to babies: everything is potentially a nipple. And if that’s wrong, honey, then I don’t want to be right. We men, we’ve got gravity down. But electronics, grunting, a breast fixation? This kid, in any fraternity, would do just fine :)

Sure, my nephew spends most of the day trying to climb down from your arms. (There’s a little catch, kiddo: gotta learn to crawl first.) And sure, the rest of the time he’s refusing to eat, spitting up on your shirt or gnawing on a power cord. But at the end of a long baby day, he’ll start making drowsy Valentino eyes at you. You’ll carry him into a sprinkling of cinnamon sunlight, croon him your most melancholy tunes, and let him stare dreamily at faraway trains. Within minutes he’ll blow a contented little note, collapse gently against you and burrow his sleep-addled eyes into your heart.

He’s in another place now, baby-chacha. He’s floating through Never-Neverland, where every beach ball’s made of velcro, nothing ever falls away, and your toes, your toes are loyal friends forever.

That little moment? He’s a heavyweight, pound for pound. My cutie owes me nothing, quite the other way around.