Silent cry

There are little tragedies, often preventable, happening all around us; calls for help that we do not hear because we're too cocooned in our own worries.

Actually, none of this sententious tosh is relevant to what happened just a few minutes ago, except that it also featured a Silent Cry. We'd just gotten home from an excursion and were pottering around, on engrossed in our domestic errands, when we suddenly realised that Sonny was uttering regular yelps that seemed halfway between howl of anger and peevish whimper. As we drew near, however, something very dramatic - and completely unprecedented - happened.

His mouth opened into a frozen expression of great anguish. His neck elongated and his eyes shuttered as though in the throes of huge torment. Yet not a sound, neither peep nor gasp, issued from the little fella. We both stared. Pa picked Sonny up. The seconds ticked by, and still, there was not a sound.

Mum and Pa were having hasty consultations. "Is this crying?", he whispered. "I think he's crying... look, there's some clear liquid pooling at his ear lobes," she replied. "Yes, but I don't see any teardrops or tear-tracks near Sonny's eyes," he countered, adding: "And in any case, who turned the sound off?"

We both agreed that whatever was going was almost cartoonishly dramatic. And still, as Pa clutched our six-month-old baby, he was frozen into an endless second of silence. It was as though someone had hit the 'Pause' button, except we weren't characters in a DVD. Or maybe Sonny had somehow been transformed into one, going by his stock-stillness. We were beginning to wonder if, completely out of the blue, he had gone utterly crazy.

After a good 10 seconds had gone by, there was a shudder. A great big tear rolled down. And things returned to something approaching normal. Sonny became crying wildly, Mum hurried to supply more milk while Pa collapsed into the computer chair, asking himself wildly, "Will anyone believe us if I blog about this?" It was one of those "lost-time" episodes that people who believe in extra-terrestrials and flying saucers like to talk about. Except it had happened to our son.

As these words are typed, the little fella has fallen into a deep sleep. Maybe the imminent eruption of his teeth has played havoc with his hormones, or psychic wiring, or whatever keeps him tethered to infant normalcy. At all events, if this Silent Cry episode recurs, we'll have to start doing some serious research into what's going on, which should involve reading medical texts... and probably watching selected episodes of The X-Files.

Big Time Toy still eludes us

One of our more egregious failures in recent months is a lapsed quest for a Big Time Toy.

Sonny, freshly embarked on a seventh month with us, is by now quite capable to fiddling and having fun with little playthings (though he mainly tries to eat them). The kindness of friends and relatives, along with Mum's odd sally into a shop, has left him with options ranging from a furry donkey to Rainbow the fish (pull a fin and it shudders awake) and some cloth books. But we're aiming to score big, literally, with a larger-scale item that can engage and entrance the little fella, so he can both develop skills and amuse himself. Pa's code name for the project is 'Operation Big Time Toy'.

The closest we've come so far is what might best be described as a suspended super-rocker. Supported on poles, its seat allows Sonny to bounce about with no fear of falling while he tackles the myriad delights built into the dashboard. Depending on the make of the super-rocker (yes, there's a variety) these include flashing-bleeping things, twirly-whirly gewgaws, a selection of half-hidden animals for him to suss out and much more besides. Such a contraption would appear to offer hours of fun, during which his powers of co-ordination, spatial recognition and assorted other '-ions' are surreptitiously boosted.

The problem with Operation Big Time Toy is that we have a sneaking suspicion the little fella will soon lose interest in whatever we buy him, leaving us with a bulky white elephant with no discernible function. The name of the game these days, after all, is 'dual use'. This has relevance to deadly-serious things like restricted technologies. These, if purchased by dubious regimes like those in power in Iran or North Korea, could be turned from peaceable uses (making better lightbulbs, say) to dangerous ones (superweapons). Somewhat less momentously, with Sonny, we try to procure things that pass the dual use test. For instance, we have a nifty high chair that will allow him to eat at the dining table by and by, but also converts into a desk-and-work-chair set.

Big Time Toys, for some reason, tend not to pass scrutiny when the dual use test is applied. So we'll just have to see how things go. Sonny's having plenty of fun with his Small Time Toys, and there'll be less heartbreak or wallet-linked rage in case of breakage or equipment malfunction. But the quest will continue. Fitfully.

Sonny hits the six-month mark

Incredibly, six months have flitted past.

It's now officially half-a-year ago that Sonny emerged to torment... that is to say, brighten our lives. There Mum was, worried to all heck because the doctor had been just a little too generous with the epidural and she couldn't feel the lower half of her body at all. Push, the doctor and nurse had said... and all she could do was sort of heave, except she didn't know if her muscles were responding at all.

Luckily, she did enough. Sonny duly arrived - looking (if this makes any sense at all) initially impossibly big, and then impossibly tiny. He's been making up for that ever since, staging a still-astounding demonstration of accelerated growth powered solely by the rather thin-looking milk that Mum produces. By now, he moves much more, yells much louder and responds far more readily to stimuli than just a couple of months ago. "Things will be pretty good till he's about two years old," a friend told us the other day. Obviously, he hadn't spent much time with our little fella, who's by now enormously more of a hassle than before.

The weird thing is, though it's only been a half-year, it's really not that easy for us to remember what life was like without Sonny. Sure, we can pack him off to the infant care centre and zip over to Starbucks for lattes, telling ourselves 'Ah, how we miss this freedom'. And we do, sort of. But Sonny still lurks as a mental presence in our minds, an inner clock is always ticking down towards when he must be picked up from his caregivers. There's a perpetual reminder of the Sonny-fication of our lives, whether it's the photo in Mum's wallet or the overflow of toys and clothes at home. He can't be gotten away from, we wouldn't really know how to start - and it's not as though we'ld ever want to (save during the odd stressful moment).

Looking forward, too, a whole host of fresh milestones are already swimming towards us (including, literally, Sonny's first dip in the pool; Mum's already bought the infant trunks). His teeth are impatient to erupt and get chompin': We know because we can feel them when Sonny decides our fingers will make a nice snack. His full-bore crawling days are almost upon us, and he's half-way towards being able to sit up. Mad mumblings and burblings point to the life-changing moment when he will utter his first words. By the way, Mum and Pa are still vying to see if he'll say 'Mum' or 'Pa' first. Place your bets if you like.

Now that we think of it, that competition was brought up in our very first post (click here to revisit it). And all the coming milestones, trivial or momentous, will continue to be chronicled in these ill-disciplined ramblings. Of course, the blog is just another appurtenance of Sonny's baby-faced takeover of our lives. Six months down... a lifetime to go.

Tagged! Seven random facts

The estimable Ruth, whose Ruth the Mom delivers jolts of humour as regularly as an expresso machine produces good java, has linked us into an entertaining round of tagging.

The rules, as reproduced on the left, require that we offer seven titillating - oh, all right, just random - facts about ourselves (we're counting Mum, Pa and Sonny as one virtual person). Then we'll tag seven other bloggers - who may or may not wish to keep the ball rolling.

So here are the facts:

1) Sonny has been perfecting the art of dry-eyed crying. When he wants attention, he sits there looking crafty (you need to work on an expression of injured innocence, youngster), and sends out exploratory howls that increase in volume the longer he is ignored. He did that for 45 minutes straight last night, until Mum caved in.

2) Mum does a good interpretation of a zombie. That's because she is very tired these days and will call Pa on the way to work to moan, in tones that invoke the living dead: "I'm sooo sleeepy". Why? See item (1) above. Our efforts to steel ourselves and not rush immediately to Sonny's aid have robbed Mum of much shut-eye.

3) Pa comes from a line of heavy sleepers. His father before him napped so incessantly that Pa's brother once wrote in a primary school essay: " My father's hobby is sleeping". Now Pa is carrying on the tradition - aided by drowsiness-inducing medication that he regularly takes. The upshot is that he can sleep through anything: Ringing telephones, traffic noise and even the phenomenon addressed in item (1).

4) Pa has ten toes. To be more exact, he is presently wondering why it is that nature has given humans ten, as opposed to six or four. He can understand that an even number makes better evolutionary sense, since it presumably allowed primitive humans better balance as they fled sabre-toothed tigers or whatever menaced them thousands of years ago. But why 10? In fact, why does this tag game stipulate seven, rather than eight, or nine, random facts? Such inane thoughts are fairly typical of frustrated philosophers, or possibly people who - despite claims to the contrary - are sleep-deprived due to the phenomenon addressed in item (1).

5) Mum is an inveterate dreamer. That is to say, hardly a night goes by without her embarking on remarkable adventures or braving terrors in her sleep. Of course, this was before the advent of the phenomenon addressed in item (1) and a subsequent loss of sleep.

6) Sonny has sealed an unholy alliance of some sort with the infant care centre. Maybe they're bribing him with an extra-soft blanket. It's the only explanation for why, going by the logs kept by his caregivers, he snoozes for hours and hours over there, depriving them of a chance to earn their salary. Instead, Sonny chooses to stay awake at home, preferably when his parents are trying to get some shut-eye. Should they be impertinent enough to deposit him in his cot, he will immediately commence the activity described in item (1).

7) The economy may be in danger of going to hell in a handbasket, but Mum and Pa are doing some cautious househunting. There are a number of reasons for this: The hope of settling in a district with better schools and taking advantage of market trends. With a slightly larger pad, too, we could deposit Sonny in his own little room at some distance from ours, and let him indulge in the activity described in item (1) while we snooze happily away.

Well, there's the lot. Now for the folks being invited to join the tag party. All have blogs that we enjoy visiting:


I) Enchanted by Scraps
II) Mumsgather
III) Nona Nita
IV) Sheena and Greg
V) Sturgent
VI) Jane
VII) Penny

Righto, it's time for a nap.

Watching next to nothing can be exciting

The other day, Pa and his mother went to the golf course to chase a dimpled ball all around a couple of kilometres of soggy greenery. What we didn't expect to have to do, infuriatingly, was hang about for eons while the folks ahead of us fussed and fiddled, then drove extra balls off the tee.

A few hours later, we were back at home, watching Sonny with almost lurid fascination while the little fella prepared to heave his minimal bulk forward a few millimetres at a time. Length by painful length, Sonny took a heck of a lot longer to get going than those characters at the golf course. Yet watching the young 'un wiggle his posterior, sway sideways and squish himself into a wormlike stance was entirely enjoyable. Waiting for those golfers, on the other hand, was the equivalent of a devilish torture someone should recommend to the kindly folks at Guantanamo.

All of which is to say that there's a certain fascination attached to the doings of babies that imbues their most trivial actions with interest and suspense. Witnessing Sonny master the rudiments of crawling is just one example. Another might be his attempts to grasp a toy that is just out of reach: You can see the little fella flex his fingers and stretch his arm while hooting and howling as though urging on someone at some Olympic event. There's a whole drama encapsulated in the trivial attempt: How he first zeroes in on one item among several, then how he studies it to work out how best to attack. Then comes the huge expenditure of energy that is actually lunging for it, the agony of missing by a finger's length, the gearing up for another charge...

Even at rest and doing pretty much nothing at all, Sonny can hold our attention. His grandmother swears that 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star', of all the kiddy songs in the world, can somehow hold the little fella in a trance, silencing wild sobbing and shutting down his 'non-stop curiosity' chip so that he will quietly park himself and enjoy the music. Why this should be the case is probably beyond science.

Which is probably true of just why we find infant activities quite so entertaining.