Man vs. Baby Page 17
My mom read to me as a baby. I don’t remember those first books, but then I don’t ever remember not being read to as a child. An enjoyment of books is the finest gift she ever gave me (apart from a pair of suede roller skates in about 1989—they were pretty sweet).
I want Charlie to enjoy books as much as I do, and if he does, it will be my gift to him, passed down the generations, to soften the blow of my genetic predisposition to big ears and an intolerance to eggs.
And so I find myself, when it comes to books, finally in agreement with the experts and the scientists. But not for the dry epithets of cognitive development or bonding, but to instill a love.
Ignoring the one you hold in your hand right now, books can be educational and instructive, but at their best they can be redemptive, crushing, life-defining, and perfect. A testament to the best of us, a record of the worst, a eulogy or monument to the very essence of what it means to be human.
Unless it’s something by Ann Coulter, in which case it’s a load of old shit.
MUSIC
When it comes to entertaining a baby, music may not be treated with the same intellectual respect as books, but it also doesn’t suffer from the same stigma or criticism as TV. Depending on the tunes.
These are genuinely Charlie’s favorite songs:
“Hotel Yorba”—The White Stripes
“Sound of da Police”—KRS-One
“Homophobic Asshole”—Senseless Things
“Old Time Rock and Roll”—Bob Seger
“Hard to Handle”—The Black Crowes
“Town Called Malice”—The Jam
“Son of Mustang Ford”—Swervedriver
“Suckerpunch”—The Wildhearts
“Ace of Spades”—Motörhead
Fair enough, some of these choices are a bit unorthodox. “Sound of da Police” is a song about racial profiling and police brutality. “Hotel Yorba” is about a hotel popular with prostitutes and drug users, “Ace of Spades” is about cheating the devil through hard drinking and gambling, and as far as I can work out, “Town Called Malice” is a song about a town in Surrey called Woking.
But these were the songs buried on my iPod that Charlie responded to, and he seemed to enjoy these tunes a lot more than the traditional baby songs about how many monkeys were jumping on a bed, before one fell off and bumped its head. So we compiled this playlist, and we play it while dressing him or changing his diaper (and both me and Lyns often sing and dance around like idiots while we do).
I shared Charlie’s playlist on Spotify and mentioned it on the Man vs. Baby blog. The response was interesting. A lot of parents shared their own unorthodox song choices, from Johnny Cash to AC/DC to Taylor Swift. But others expressed disgust that we would allow some of these songs to be heard by a baby.
“Sorry, I just don’t think it’s appropriate [for babies] to listen to. Their brain is a sponge and they pick up on everything.”
This was one comment that was typical, and it was an idea that I thought was a bit strange. Charlie may indeed have a baby’s loofahlike brain, but it struck me as weird to think that a six-month-old baby listening to the White Stripes is any more or less likely to become interested in drugs. Any more than he is likely to deconstruct the lyrics to “Sound of da Police” and grow to become a toddler that beefs with the local cops.
He just enjoys the beat and the noise of certain songs, that’s all. And he responds to the fact that we enjoy them as well.
What strikes me as really odd is that people might be critical of playing a baby these songs but will happily play their own babies traditional nursery rhymes. Traditional tunes that are either crap or, at worst, downright sinister, with regular references to death by choking, decapitation, and encouragements to think that you’re a teapot.
Here is a traditional nursery rhyme CD that we bought, imaginatively titled Traditional Nursery Rhyme CD. This is the track listing:
So, keeping in mind the criticisms of playing modern music to your baby, I looked up the meanings of some of these catchy numbers:
“Ring a Ring o’ Roses” (a.k.a. “Ring Around the Rosie”): This is a cheery little tune about the spread of the bubonic plague. The lyrics are basically a list of symptoms culminating in an agonizing death. All together now, kids. . . .
“Oranges and Lemons”: Depending on which historical interpretation you accept, this is about either child sacrifice, public executions, or Henry VIII’s marital difficulties. In any case, it ends with the line “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” So it’s not exactly “Little Miss Muffet” (which, in itself, is a rhyme about bloody arachnophobia).
“Georgie Porgie”: . . . who “kissed the girls and made them cry” is a charming little ditty about sexual harassment.
“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”: This is not a song about gardening but a rhyme about homicidal nut job Queen Mary and her taste for torture (“pretty maids all in a row” refers to the newly invented guillotine, and “cockleshells” is apparently a reference to a torture device you attach to the genitals).
* * *
These are just a few examples, and there are loads of others.
“Pop Goes the Weasel” is about the cycle of poverty. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” is about crippling tax. And “Jack and Jill” is truly horrifying, as it’s the name of the worst Adam Sandler film ever made, in which he plays both his sister and himself with “hilarious” consequences. (Actually, “Jack and Jill” is also another one of those catchy, toe-tapping tunes about beheading.)
In fact, in the 1950s a guy called Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, who was worried about all this stuff, studied the two hundred most popular nursery rhymes, and in those he found:
• 8 allusions to murder (unclassified)
• 2 cases of choking to death
• 1 case of cutting a person in half
• 1 case of death by devouring
• 15 allusions to maimed human beings or animals
• 23 cases of physical violence (unclassified)
So, don’t worry about playing your kid a bit of thrash death-metal or grime. If your alternative is to expose them to traditional nursery rhymes, you might as well be plopping them down to watch a horror film or someone get torn a new asshole on Game of Thrones.
TOYS
When it comes to entertainment, if all else fails you could always try playing with your child.
Play is crucial for your child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive growth. It’s your child’s way of learning about his body and the world, and he’ll use all five senses to do it, especially in the first year. —BabyCenter.com
So we spent a small fortune on toys that were advertised as educational and engaging: products like Baby Einstein toys that, according to the website, are “designed to enrich baby’s young mind.” We weren’t trying to “hothouse” Charlie or create a genius, but if he could learn something at the same time as he was playing, then that seemed like a good thing. In hindsight, we could have drawn two eyes and a mouth on a cardboard box, and Charlie and “Boxy” would have been friends well into toddlerdom (without the crippling investment in batteries). That’s because babies only play in three different ways:
Bash it.
Bite it.
Throw it.
Consequently, when one of Charlie’s toys lights up and says in an American accent: “Would you like to learn the ABCs?” Charlie’s response is generally: “No, thanks, I think I’m just going to chew your face and repeatedly smash your head against the kitchen floor.” Playtime isn’t really a time for education as much as a time for destruction-testing cute-looking animatronics. Maybe some of the educational elements go in by osmosis, but whereas we used to measure toys by their educational value, we now measure them by how much punishment they can stand.
The best of Charlie’s toys are the immersive ones, the doorway bouncers and ball pools, things like that. The worst of Charlie’s toys are the creepy, possessed, battery-devouring toys. The ones with the dea
d eyes that, out of the blue, with no one anywhere near them, request a hug or ask if you’re their friend. In the middle of the night, you hear them turn themselves on and demand to “play,” and I sit awake for the next hour trying to hear if they’re coming up the stairs or sneakily opening the knife drawer.
And it’s not just the ones that turn themselves on that give me the creeps. The most persistently creepy of Charlie’s toys is Alfie Bear, who is either singing about how “friendly” he is or insisting that he loves you over and over again like some weird bunny boiler that’s terrified you’re going to break up with him. To begin with “I love you” is cute; after the four hundredth time, it’s just menacing.
Eventually, after many weeks of this creepiness, I couldn’t take any more and worked up the courage to take him out into the garden and volley him over the back fence. . . . He was back the following day. Lyns reckons the neighbors found him, but I’m not so sure. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m scared of Alfie Bear. It’s with good reason; I’m not a qualified psychiatrist, but from my Googling and observation of Alfie’s behavior I’d say that it’s possible to give him a significant diagnosis:
I mean, you see why I can’t bloody sleep with this thing in the house.
Generally, I’m concerned about the influence that these toys are having on Charlie, and despite the fact that most professionals contend that interactive toys are great for your baby, I’m not convinced. Scientists might argue that TV is bad, but no one is saying a great deal about the flashing lights of the singing, dancing psychopaths wandering around our living room.
And here’s a scary question: What happens if we don’t want to be friends?
Thankfully, Charlie seems to have got bored with, or grown out of, a lot of his most annoying toys, and he no longer has any interest in Alfie Bear (who remains buried at the bottom of the toy box, like a Manchurian candidate waiting to be reactivated). As babies get more curious and active, their taste in toys seems to change rapidly. When Charlie was about six months old, his favorite toys were Alfie, a pull-along telephone, and some stacking blocks. Now that he is older, crawling, and more curious, his top ten favorite toys are more eclectic. This week’s top ten chart of “Shit That Charlie Likes to Play With” is as follows:
10. Any cupboard door or drawer. (Open door or drawer. Insert fingers. Close door or drawer on fingers. Melt the f*ck down. Repeat.)
9. The eyes or nose of any close relative (clawing and/or gouging)
8. The oven door (only when oven is on)
7. The dog’s water bowl
6. The dog’s food bowl
5. The dog’s tail
4. The dog’s wafer-thin sanity
3. Cups of tea or coffee . . . and anything else dangerously hot
2. Dropping to number 2 in this week’s chart after a long run at the top: Power outlets (exploring with drool-wet fingers)
1. And a brand-new entry, straight in at number 1: The kitchen garbage can (for some reason, he suddenly likes licking it)
PLAYTIME
To be honest, when it comes to playtime, all toys are pale shadows of the things that delight babies the most. And what keeps babies entranced more than anything are those things that are individual to you and your little family. For example, Charlie enjoys it when Lyndsay pretends that he is a giant baby attacking a city, or when I pretend to be a robot sent from the future to crush his tiny head. He also never fails to laugh at the baby in the mirror we call “Barry,” or when I just pretend to fall asleep and snore and wake up as the Hulk. You get the idea. These are just a few of a hundred and one stupid games we play that mean nothing to anyone outside of us three. All families have their own uniquely daft games that captivate both parents and baby. And it is the uniqueness of these games that is the finest reminder that your little person is an individual from the very start.
It is also in these bits of nonsense that entertaining your little one is at its simple best. Because good parents are the “toys” that are willing to tailor themselves to their baby’s character and brand-new personality. In the end, there isn’t a teddy bear, train set, or stack of blocks that can compete.
EXTERNAL ACTIVITIES
If you’re against TV and think books are for bedtime, you’re worried about the effect of gangsta rap, or you’re just concerned that one of your child’s dead-eyed toys is thinking about stabbing you in your sleep, it may be time to consider entertainment outside the home.
The scale of the industry built up around attempting to entertain your new arrival is astonishing and expensive. In the past, activities for babies were restricted to pushing junior down to the shops when you’d run out of smokes. Nowadays, though, there is a mind-bending array of classes to choose from: you have the option of baby yoga, baby sign language, baby sensory, swim babies . . . and probably baby tree-felling and baby deep-sea fishing, etc.
These are just some of the activities we’ve tried over the past year:
Baby sign language
This seemed like a good idea. I’d seen it in a film once, a baby before it could talk, signing that it was hungry or tired. Actually, now that I think about it, it might not have been a baby (it was a bit hairier than that)—it might have been a gorilla or a chimp or something. Anyway, the principle is the same. To begin with, babies are in a preverbal stage of their development, so if you can teach them some basic sign language, they can tell you if they’re cold, hungry, or tired. And so, for five weeks, I spent every Thursday afternoon sitting on my ass in a damp church hall with seven women, all trying to learn the sign language for poop.
This is where it collapsed. I had to learn the signs first so that I could then teach them to Charlie. Unfortunately, I’m an idiot and have the memory of timber. And, while Charlie’s brain might be a sponge, my brain is more of a petrified rock of dinosaur shit, no more capable of taking in useful information than an upturned bucket. If you throw the necessity for hand– eye coordination into that mix, it’s a disaster. By the time I was trying to pass the sign language I’d learned on to Charlie, I was pretty much guessing.
And so when I believed I was teaching Charlie the sign for milk:
I was actually teaching him the sign for bowling:
And when I was sure I was teaching him the sign for hungry:
he was actually learning the slightly less useful sign for tractor:
So after five weeks, we stopped going.
. . . For the simple reason that, after more than a month, Charlie, through no fault of his own, had learned nothing. And in the unlikely event that he found himself relying on his knowledge of sign language in order to survive, he would have dehydrated and starved to death. As he repeatedly demanded to go bowling on a tractor.
Baby rave
This is what it sounds like. It is exactly the same as an adult rave, except everyone in attendance is four feet shorter and more likely to lose their shit when a balloon bursts.
In fact, in a lot of ways, a baby rave is much better than an adult rave. Okay, the music is just as shit, but: Hardly anyone tries to sell you ketamine. You don’t have to meet off the freeway near Fresno to find out where it’s going to be. And you haven’t got some idiot in white gloves, with a glow stick and a whistle, flailing his arms and elbowing you in the face every two minutes just because the DJ’s started to play something by Basshunter.
A real plus is that baby raves tend to be organized for the morning. So it’s all done and dusted by lunchtime and you can go home for a nice cup of tea.
Boom.
Actually, I really do recommend a good baby rave. From what I’ve seen, the older kids love it—the flashing lights, the smoke, and the bassy music—and the younger kids love watching the older kids loving it.
And watching how the parents behave in this environment is interesting: from the uncomfortable mom shuffling with a baby in her arms to the “Big fish, little fish, cardboard box” dad-dancing, this is all a great reminder that your coolness is swallowed up by parenthood. But it i
s also a reminder of what you’re missing from your clubbing days: absolutely nothing.
Baby sensory
Baby sensory classes are designed to fire the five senses of your baby: sight, smell, touch, hearing, and biting. These classes bombard babies with sound and light. Part disco, part puppet show, part singsong, part sign-language instruction, they feature tambourines, maracas, bubbles, balloons, inflatable animals . . . and a song in which you say hello to sweet corn. If you’ve got a baby who’s easily bored, it’s great, because for about an hour they have a “shock and awe” bombardment of sensory stimulation thrown at them.
The local one we go to is awesome, but completely dizzying. Each class has so much glitter and sparkle and disco lighting that it feels as though you’ve wandered into RuPaul’s brain and he’s planning the opening ceremony of a gay-pride Olympics.
The lady who runs our class goes by the name of Crazy Claire. Which is an apt name. I’m pretty sure she’s not actually mad (I mean, she might keep body parts in her freezer for all I know, but, to be fair, she doesn’t seem the type). She is, though, one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever met, and it’s infectious.
The first class we went to, I was quietly tapping away with a tambourine, feeling pretty awkward. I wasn’t really sure what was going on, as everyone else joined in songs about sunshine and being friends. And Charlie looked equally unsure. But by the third class, we were carried away by Crazy Claire’s enthusiasm, and I found myself rowing along in an invisible boat, surrounded by bubbles and balloons, singing something about pirates, and bashing on an upturned plastic tub like I was in Stomp. I still don’t know why and it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. It’s fun.