London's first trick-or-treat

London was going to be a dinosaur. His Gamma got him an awesome dino costume, but it kinda freaked him out. He's always had a hard time with people that don't look like people. C-3PO makes him run screaming. So the dino costume didn't last. We'll give it another go next year.


For a backup costume, we put one of our pirate blouses on him and turned him into a ghost (albeit one with a blue hood). He loved it. Vicki used safety pins to fix the length and the sleeves and he was off and running. It didn't take him long to figure out that he needed to pick up his hem when was going up stairs or crossing uneven ground, and he didn't fall down once.


Vicki went as a geisha...


...and I was a knight.


At the first couple of houses, Tiny wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. But he got pretty good about taking one piece of candy and putting it in his basket. We took turns going to the door with him. I went with him to the first house, which was a good thing. Vicki was crying because I punched her in the neck.

NO! She was crying because London is getting so big. It is hard to believe that your little tiny baby, the one you used to cradle in the crook of one arm, is still a baby when he's hitching up his ghost costume to go get some candy.


The Triceratops basket also came from Gamma. It was supposed to be for hunting Easter eggs, but it worked just fine as a trick-or-treat basket.

London made us both laugh a lot. He looked like he stepped out of the Charlie Brown Halloween special. And for some reason on the way home he hopped out of his little car and started running. Except for holding our hands or being carried at crosswalks, he ran for four blocks straight. If you've never seen it, a little tiny man running full tilt down the sidewalk dressed as a ghost is pretty darn funny. Then he cried when we carried him inside.


But he cheered up pretty fast once we got inside and he got to eat some nem-a-nems.

We've been home for all of three hours and I'm already looking forward to doing it again.

London's words; a trip to the garden; passages

One thing I want to get down right now, before time moves on and I lose it, is the way London pronounces certain words. I am getting as many of these on video as I can, because simply transcribing them is impossible. He uses vowels and consonants that are not part of English as she is spoke. I first noticed this when London starting saying 'cookie'. The word he says is a recognizeable stand-in for 'cookie' and it means the same thing, but it's devilishly hard to pronounce. The best way I can try to convey it is 'tdookdtee'. It's not t, d, and k sounds one after each other. It's all three of them at once. Same thing with 'Ernie', from Seseame Street. He can't make a great 'r' sound yet, so it come out like... Well. First start with an 'oo' sound as in 'book'. Then use that sound to begin a word that you might write out as 'oowrnee'. That's the best I can do. See what I mean about this being hard? But it is so cute. We never talk baby talk to him and we never encourage him to pronounce words any other way than the right way. Still, I will be sad on the day when he says 'cookie' with no extra sounds.

Here's a short list of my current favorites:

abber-gobber (helicopter)

die-doe-door or die-do-sore (dinosaur)

a-wess'sew-wess (Allosaurus)

neeemel (nipple)

show-werr (shoulder)

ee-ock'eet (rocket)

Tah-buss (Thomas [the Tank Engine])

London knows Allosaurus from his garishly illustrated Alphabet of Dinosaurs. I decided to start telling him some of the real names of the dinosaurs, just to see if he'd pick any of them up. As you've probably figured out, his Alphabet of Dinosaurs starts with Allosaurus (I would have gone with the larger, meaner, cooler, native-to-Oklahoma Acrocanthosaurus, but it wasn't up to me). He's a real trooper. If he can't say the whole word, he'll say what he can. For two weeks, Allosaurus was 'at-wess'. But when I came home from the paleontology meeting he was saying 'a-wess'sew-wess'. Right now all dinosaurs are divided four tribes:

The original 'a-wess'sew-wess';

sauropods, which to him are 'ong-necks';

horned dinosaurs, which are 'seh-wa-tops';

and everything else, which are now 'die-doe-doors'. He's pretty much given up on 'guh'. Fortunately I have some 'guhs' caught on video, so although the guhs are linguistically extinct we have some nice museum specimens.

Vicki taught him nipple (neeemel) while I was away, because he had discovered his nipples and clearly wanted to know what they were. Incidentally, my brother Ryan didn't know that those things on guys were nipples until he was three or four. We were sitting outside shirtless in the summertime and somehow I happened to refer to nipples as nipples. Ryan lectured me as if I was slightly stupid, "Matt, only girls have nipples." I told him no, guys had nipples, too, and if he didn't believe me he could go ask Mom. He went into the house, and a couple of minutes later he came out, shaking his head in adorable disbelief.

True story.

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We're having a real Indian summer here in Berkeley, with temperatures getting up into the low 80s during the day and staying in shirtsleeve numbers pretty much around the clock. We've been taking advantage of this by getting London out for a walk every evening after he gets home from daycare. It's something that we've been doing almost every day since we moved in, but I suppose we will have to cut back soon when the rainy season kicks in for real. There is a school garden a couple of blocks from the house that is open to the public after school hours, and London LOVES to go there; that's 'loves' as in 'literally cries and throws a fit when it's time to leave, no matter how dark it's gotten'.


London also loves the Cookie Monster backpack that Gammah and Gammah got him. Those would be my parents; Vicki's parents are Mimi and Papa. And no, I didn't misspell them, I wrote them the way he says them. He usually wears Cookie Monster from right after supper until bathtime and bedtime. Thanks, Gammah and Gammah.




One of London's favorite activites is finding rocks and bringing them to me to hold. The ones he hands to me are later released back into their natural environment after he loses interest, but sometimes he carries a rock or two all the way home. We have a small collection outside the door of our apartment.




London is very self-possessed. He will glady follow directions from Vicki or me while we are on our way to the garden or the park, but once he is loose there he wants to go on his own and have us follow. And when we get home, he will let us know whether he wants juice or milk, and then he will flop on whatever patch of floor he wants and rehydrate. In the evenings, he spends part of his time playing with us or bringing us books to read, but he also usually spends at least an hour playing by himself.


We have some new nighttime rituals. His Cookie Monster backpack, Elmo doll, and Cookie Monster hand puppet all get put to bed (night-night) on one throw pillow, and sometimes his two biggest die-doe-doors get put down on another and covered up with a towel or blanket. He started doing this spontaneously when I was out of town.


And then he crawls up on the couch and puts himself to sleep. If he runs out of milk or juice along the way, he lets me know that he needs more, and then he just...drifts off. As soon as he's out for good, I carry him to his crib. Often Vicki and I sneak into his room later to watch him sleep. If you're a parent, you know what that's about. If not, I hope you get to find out.

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The last photo (below) just may be my favorite picture of London of all time. It was not planned at all; it is one of those things that just happened. We were all in the garden, standing under a lattice that supports some kiwis. (Thanks to some confusion a few weeks ago about just what I was pointing to, he still thinks that the kiwis are called 'the sun'.) London suddenly got bored and took off, as toddlers are wont to do. As he walked through the arch of vines I snapped the picture; like Rosenthal on Iwo Jima I just happened to hit the button at the right time.

The picture encapsulates a lot of what is going on in our lives right now. London is developing so fast. We've been saying for months that there's not much baby left, and every day it is a little bit truer. But we are growing with him. Every day we see the world fresh, for the first time, through the eyes of a toddler. I find that I am more aware of everything that goes on around me, because of him. When we go to the park, I am aware of every kite, every boat, every airplane that passes overhead, every bird, every tree, every rock, and every stick. He sees commonalities that would never occur to me, expresses interests that have been dormant in me since I was a child, and shares his findings, his toys, and his love with an openness that strikes me to my core. I love him beyond the capacity for thoughts to encompass or words to express.

Time is pulling him away from me, slowly but inevitably, like drifting continents. And that, as they say (but rarely mean), is Life.


A young man is like a falcon. When you remove the hood and untie the jesses, he leaps from your arm and launches himself into the sky. You look at him dwindling, so proud and so free, and you wonder if he'll ever return to you.

-- Michael Swanwick, "A Changeling Returns"