Oh, baby.
24 July 2008The Baby was in glen rock for a one night engagement last week on the occasion of her turning one. One! Remember when she was born? And now she’s practically driving? Babies are so weird like that. When she started walking I called Bud and told him I didn’t approve. “I think I liked her better when I could just leave her somewhere and know she’d still be there when I came back.” Bud, while silently crossing me off his list of babysitters, responded “I’ll see what I can do about it.” Bud and Buds Wife Katie were in the Rock while mom and I were somewhere in.. Utah? Maybe? and we spoke to them as they were driving back to Virginia. “Meg found a new way to tell us she’s pissed off,” Bud said, referring to when Meg had learned to clap and figured out it was a great way to get anyone’s attention, and just clapped angerly whenever katie wasn’t feeding her quickly enough, or if she wanted something that was out of reach. Her new party trick/ attention getter is apparently the Indian Noise, where you tap your hand over your mouth while doing the zombie moan out of reverence for the people who preceded us on this continent. “All she does now when she’s mad is make the indian noise. After about 5 hours in the car, it’s like Last of the Mohicans in the backseat.”
I was pretty excited about this. So when I saw her, all I did was try to get her to make the indian noise. I stopped just short of doing a rain dance and singing Tiger Lily’s part in Peter Pan. No dice. She doesn’t understand “Meg, I’d like you to make the indian noise now, please” but she does get that when you yell “touchdown!” she’s supposed to throw her arms above her head, which is pretty great.
What follows is 4 minutes of absolutely nothing. She’s the Seinfeld of babies– nothing really happens, and none of us can stop watching. I didn’t put music over this because what’s going on in the background is way too great– when I’m not inquiring as to whether or not meg is about to fall on her ass (”is she about to eat it?” is not a reference to her birthday cake) or laughing when she does fall and then telling her to Walk It Off, I’m generally demanding that she make the indian noise, to no avail. But my favorite part of the whole thing is Aunt Patti. After this one, I decided that I’m only attending these Everyone Sit Around And Look At The Baby parties in the future if Aunt Patti is there, because she’s the only one who keeps it real. Unlike my mom, who thinks Meg cries whenever she leaves the room and therefore won’t be in a different room from the baby…. ever… or all of meg’s other relatives who become completely incapable of carrying on a conversation in her presence, Aunt Patti can still hold it down. Aunt Roe can hold it down, too, but this time she abandoned me in the baby party way too early for her presence to be a normalizing influence, leaving me with The Baby and 8,000 toys that play awful, awful music whenever The Baby touches them, and various relatives who refuse to go more than 2 feet away from Meg. In the second part of the Meg montage, Patti starts asking me questions about zombies, and it’s awesome. It’s particularly awesome if you’ve read World War Z, because all you’ll see is Meg’s adorable face but all you’ll hear is Patti going “so when he said that the biggest victims of the war were the whales, what do you think that means? Do you think they were just torn apart by the survivor ships?” Aunt Patti keeps it real.
Meg’s 1st Birthday from Cristin on Vimeo.
2 Responses to “Oh, baby.”
July 24th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I kind of wonder what this whole generation of blogged-about babies are going to think when they grow up and learn to use the Interwebs. (I mean, Meg is obviously going to hold you to that beer promise once her DNA kicks in.) Will it be like how horrified secretly pleased I was to find out that my parents mostly took pictures of me at the expense of my brother Charlie? Or will the zombie apocalypse have happened and therefore we will have eaten the Interwebs already?
July 25th, 2008 at 7:38 am
I totally think about this all the time, particularly since I have a few friends who are really good about keeping their babies off the internet… but if you’re born a Stickles, you never had a chance at anonymity, anyway.
I have a box of stuff I’m saving for Meg for when she graduates from college or something, and it has printouts of all the emails her dad sent me about her, and all the pictures we’ve taken of her, etc, so she’ll also have tangible proof of our family-wide obsession with her.