Carolyne

Adventures in Eating and Swinging

Your humble host is aware that he has been slacking lately on the Carolyne posts. This is not for lack of activity on her part, I assure you. At 8.5 months, Carolyne has been — to put it in software terms - adding features in a hurry: the sitting up feature, the lunging for things feature, the twisting-around-to-look-at-things-no-matter-where-they-are feature. And then there are her adventures.

Since she was born, whenever we go someplace in the car we usually term it an “adventure,” and that includes asking Carolyne whether she’s ready for her adventure. She almost always is, of course. Eating was not an adventure, in the sense that she seemed quite prepared and made few distinctions between whatever was placed in front of her. Over Christmas, she was the Great Consumption Machine, showing off for the folks. And her daycare provider routinely reports that she will declare herself still hungry by grunting and growling (lady-like, of course).

At home this pattern does not always hold. Dinner, for example, can be an adventure, especially now that we’ve introduced “puffs,” these tasty tiny treats that seem to be the fewest molecules that will stick together and be visible. Carolyne always wants her puffs, even if she’s refusing her other food. And she’d like you to feed them to her, even though she can pick them up just fine. Service economy and all that. The best way I can describe what it’s like to offer her some food with my finger is the way Tim Bray did last month: “The tiny lips, no teeth behind them, are amazingly warm and soft and alive; it occurs to me that this is what it feels like to be a sea anemone’s meal.”

But really, my words don’t do her performances justice. I’m preparing some video that will show you some her usual stuff, but in the meantime we’ll begin with something she also likes: swinging at the park. For those of you who have witnessed this before, note that this time there is no supporting material holding her in the swing!