Week 21 Day 4: Thug life

Gavin and I went to the Kids Zone/Romp and Stomp (I don't know what it's called at this point. I think if you're in the gym, which we were, it's Romp and Stomp, but if you're in the room across the hall with all of the toys it's Kids Zone) at the community center again today and we were accused of sneaking in. Actually all of us were (there were two other moms with kids). KZ/R&S is not free. You pay for visits in advance ($10 for 5 visits) and each time you go you scan your card at this little unmanned scanner by the entrance. The scanner makes a very loud beeping sound, which I know because I dutifully scanned my card because Gavin and I aren't scammers. So we're playing in the gym, minding our own business, and a guy who works there comes in and says in kind of a patronizing tone, "I don't have any of you up on my computer," to which I respond, "What does that mean?" And he says, "That means nobody here scanned their cards on the way in." All three of the grown ups present say that we did, indeed, scan our cards. He takes all of our names and scans us in manually, but I have to admit the whole thing irked me. I guess I just don't like being accused of something I didn't do. If you're going to accuse me of anything today, accuse me of dressing my son like a dweeb. That I am guilty of, at least for the time we were at KZ/R&S. It was super hot today and so I had him in a t-shirt, some jean shorts and his new sandals. I didn't want him crawling around on the gym floor in shorts because I didn't want him to get floor burn all over his knees. So when we got there I pulled a pair of grey sweatpants over top his shorts. So he played in sweats and sandals, happy as can be and cute to boot despite of his get up. It's just not a look a lot of people can pull off -- or should even try.

I got an email from BabyCenter.com today that informed me that babies at this age (10 months) usually have their fine motor skills working, you know, mighty fine. They can pick up really small objects now. This is very true for Gavin. He is Mr. Detritus. If there's something tiny on the floor, something an adult human wouldn't even see, Gavin will find it, pick it up, and try to put it in his mouth. "Consider vacuuming more often at this stage," offered the BabyCenter newsletter. Yes, I will consider this. I will consider this with all of my might. Thank you, BabyCenter. Thank you.

Gavin's mighty fine motor skills do make feeding time more fun, though. When we first introduced puffs to him it was a no-go. Now he loves them (he does not love the puffed rice cereal that Stacy bought for him before we got him puffs. Not even the dog will eat the puffed rice cereal). We start off each meal with a small handful of puffs so he is busied in his high chair while I mix and mash his food. We even have a little puffs dance we do. Well, I have a puffs dance that I do. He just sits in his high chair and smiles really big. Actually, that's pretty much what he always does when we dance with and/or for him. You could say it's his signature move.

Yesterday morning during our walk Stacy said Gavin looked like a bully in the photos from the Parent Club picnic. Parent Club, as I have mentioned, is a group of parents with babies Gavin's age organized by the hospital. I have attended exactly one of the meetings and Gavin has attended, I believe, two of them. Stacy attended the majority of them solo. The problem was that the meetings were at 7 p.m. on Wednesdays. Gavin just doesn't stay up that late. He's almost always unconscious by 7:00 every night. It quickly became obvious that dragging him to meetings, even meetings where he would get to interact with babies his same age, was a no go. This past meeting, however, was at 5:00 on Saturday. It was the last official meeting so it was a picnic of sorts at one of the organizer's houses. Basically we all sat on towels and blankets on her lawn and the babies crawled around and parents swapped kid stories and notes (there was supposed to be swimming but the pool was too cold). Gavin got a lot of attention since no one had seen him since he was a wee little thing in a baby sling sleeping through the first couple of meetings. We got a lot of comments about how big he is. He's the biggest baby in the group. As you might expect, when you get a bunch of 10-month-olds together there is bound to be a lot of variation in growth and development. One little girl, for example, already has 8 teeth while others only have a couple. Nobody is really walking yet, though at one point I was showing off how Gavin could stand and he walked to me, maintaining his two and a half step record. People were pretty impressed and I can't say I didn't swell with pride a bit myself.

So yes, back to the bully comment. Anne, a woman in the group, posted some pictures on Facebook that she'd taken at the meeting. Gavin is in several of these photos (I, too, took some photos, but am only just now getting around to putting them online). Stacy said that while looking at Anne's photos she thought that Gavin looked like abully and that we needed to be careful about that so that he didn't grow up to be one. "What the hell are you talking about?" is probably how I responded. She said that, for one thing, he's bigger than the other babies and that in a lot of the photos he's taking toys away from other kids and to top it off she said he was dressed like a bully with his little tank top and sunscreen slicked faux hawk. "You are being insane," is an approximation of what I said at this point. I also pointed out that size does not determine whether or not someone is a bully. And furthermore Gavin was hardly the party thug snatching toys away from the other hapless babies. All of them were freely taking toys away from each other, always wanting whatever toys they didn't currently have in their hands. This is pretty typical 10-month-old play behavior. And in defense of Gavin's sartorial emsemble, I personally picked out his tank top and shorts and he looked damn cute. You can see for yourself in this photo that I took. I then told her she was "projecting and being weird," which I am fairly certain is in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

This bully thing has never occurred to me. I mean, yes, I have thought about bullies and want very much for my son not to be one, but I have never thought that Gavin was a burgeoning Nelson Muntz. I really don't think that Gavin even has any bullying models to go off of at this point. It's not like he watches his moms beat each other up or anything. We're raising him to not be a bully. I haven't studied bully psychology intently or anything, but I don't think kids just decide to become total abusive assholes to everyone one day. The kid who lives across the street from us who hears his dad call his mom a stupid fucking bitch all the time? He's in bully training camp, I think. Gavin, not so much.