In Which the Husband Complains about Gestational Diabetes

Sure, Julie has to stab herself with a needle five times a day, but think about my pain.

Whatever happened to the days when we would think nothing of knocking off a whole box of pasta (cooked, thank you, with a little olive oil and parmesan) together in front of the TV? Now Julie is counting every grain of rice on her plate, and I must soldier on alone to maintain our household carb consumption. I'm not sure I can do it.

Not that I'm unwilling to try — put a half dozen bagels or a pound of candied ginger on the corner of my desk and they'll be gone by morning — but there's a limit to what a guy can do.  Especially when I can't rely on a partner to consume the other half of the batch of sourdough rolls coming out of the oven or the bag of chocolate whatnots from the grocery store. Even the kick of feeling noble and protective as I sample the latest batch of holiday cookies eventually palls.

Worse yet, as I gird myself for yet another assault on the starch mountain, I feel a certain sense of guilt. Perhaps as I dollop the vanilla ice cream over a thick slice of freshly-baked apple pie, I should be a little less exuberant about how wonderful it's going to taste and how I'm going to enjoy every last flaky, creamy bite and savor the delicious fragrance rising from the place.

We're counting the weeks.

Bronzing the disposable jumpsuit

(picking up the story, as the one who was mostly conscious at the time)

I was already a little bit nervous (ok, a lot nervous) because Julie's idea of mild discomfort is being stabbed with red-hot icepicks. So you can imagine my disquiet as I waited patiently for the supermarket pharmacist to explain to someone that they would get a refund as soon as they brought in a legible photocopy of their father's insurance card before asking, "What's the way to the nearest hospital?"

Guess who didn't know. The pharmacist behind the counter conferred with the other pharmacist and decided the best thing for me to do was hang a left out of the parking lot, get on the highway by the Dunkin Donuts down the road, and follow the signs because the hospital was somewhere near the next exit. Of course it wasn't, it was at the exit before that.

I'm going to skip over the part about waiting an hour to see the triage nurse (Julie made the mistake of walking up to the desk to sign in, instead of snagging a wheelchair at the door) and then being told, "You're pregnant, we can't even examine you down here until you've been cleared by Labor&Delivery."

When Julie got to the part of the medical history that involved having both placentia previa (requiring a preterm c-section) and gestational diabetes (which kinda wants the baby to stay in as long as possible to finish baking) the OB on call said under her breath, "You got to be kidding me" and I started to get scared.

We stayed that way most of the afternoon and into the evening (I can't really vouch for Julie's emotions since she was mostly passed out between pain and a hit each of morphine and demerol), especially after the obvious things kept coming up negative (the littlest bit of sludge in the gallbladder on ultrasound, no fetal distress whatsoever -- the nurse had to keep adjusting the fetal monitor as batman turned cartwheels out of range). It would have been nice to have had something to do, but other than patting Julie's head there wasn't much. (We thought about calling my aunt or sister or Julie's parents, but what would you say -- "Julie is terribly sick, nobody has any idea what's wrong, and there's nothing you can do to help, just thought you should know"?)

About 930 the OB came in with the answers from the 8 o'clock blood tests: bad liver enzymes were up, platelets had fallen by half in the past six hours, in another few hours they would probably have fallen far enough for surgery to be unsafe.

Was there any time for steroid injections to mature Batman's lungs, I asked (this is called "the bargaining phase").

One nurse started Julie on her various drips and another handed me the nonwoven zippered suit along with mask, hat and booties (did I mention I have kind of a long torso so that I had to hunch over and couldn't really sit down properly?). Then everything else happened with all deliberate speed.

I patted Julie's head some more, we made small talk with the anesthesiologist -- who did a bangup job: she didn't even feel the things he said she might feel -- and at some point someone said "there's the head" and a while later we heard some infant-crying sounds. I peeked up over the drape that separated me and julie and the anesthesiologist from the interesting part of the OR and saw a little blood-spattered butt and torso with the umbilical cord still heading down into the incision, then sat down again. Half an hour, thousands of additional words of small talk, three or four countings of medical supplies and a fine running stitch with only a little dogleg at the end later, that part of things was all over.

As Julie's nephew once said, "May you please never let me do that again."

Resting comfortably

Except when people (like us) are bugging him or three or four other babies in the NICU are bawling simultaneously, Charlie is pretty peaceful. He doesn't like the snorkel when it goes in, but not having to breathe so hard quiets him down in a few minutes. This morning, his nurse told us, he decided to conduct his own trial of going without CPAP, but that didn't work so well, so we had a talk with him about practising medicine before going to nursery school. I'm sure he listened carefully, as he has to our little discussions about not bending his arm so as to pinch off his IV.

For company, he also has a picture of a dog and a cat taped on the access doors of his isolette -- which is more than we have in the way of pets these days.

Warning, maudlin

You read sometimes about parents going into their kids' rooms at night, just to watch them breathe. It's a little different when your kid is in an isolette and the reason you're watching him breathe is so that every couple of minutes or so, when he decides to stop, you can wiggle his hands and feet or rub his belly to wake him up so that he remembers to start up again.

Charlie had something of a fit (as opposed to a snit) late yesterday afternoon while his vitals were being checked, and after five or ten minutes solid of yelling at the top of his tiny lungs, once he did settle down, he settled right down to complete inactivity, including the non-optional breathing part. As soon as anyone woke him up he breathed fine, but there was an uncertain path to tread between bugging him enough to keep him breathing, but not enough to to set off another snit.

He was kinda sick and cranky and hungry, so you can't blame him too much. And after a couple of hours — that would be 7000 individual seconds, more or less — and an IV hit of caffeine he got the breathing knack back and started resting comfortably. This morning he sucked down almost an ounce of milk straight from the bottle, mostly without opening his eyes, and digested it like a champ. So much more fun to watch than the other way.

Makeready

During my first drive home and back, I had recurring visions of being stopped for speeding and explaining that my wife (!) and baby (!!) were in a hospital in Connecticut and I had to get back to them as soon as I could. How much better an excuse than that could I have, after all, to drive almost as fast as the wieners from New York and Massachusetts who always whiz by in the left lane?

This time, in my imagination -- especially on that stretch of I-91 where all the cars that look like they have radar detectors suddenly merge right -- the officer was going to ask why I thought I had to go so allfired fast, and I was going to have to explain that I was carrying 10 days worth of frozen breast milk in a collapsible ice chest, and had to get home before it thawed. "You don't really want to know," the conversation was going to begin, and then it was going to get worse.

Nothing of the sort, of course. One of the NICU nurses gave me three bags of ice to add to the coldpacks, I turned the heat in the car as low as my toes could stand, and every bottle was solider than a sub-zero Dove Bar at the other end. (And that's after stopping for about 15 minutes after I got home to gaze in awe at the two face cords of UPS boxes in the garage. my gratitude has no words, only sniffles)

After a short shopping trip, Charlie now has diapers, wipes and baby-wash at home. Tomorrow I figure out how to strap the co-sleeper to our bed, launder all of his clothes that I can find, and sit down for a long heart-to-heart with the cats about "prey" and "not-prey".

It's a good thing he's not going to remember any of this

Imagine: you're sitting there quietly sipping your drink, and a hand the size of your torso comes out of nowhere, snatches it out of your mouth and grabs you by the jaw. You're pulled forward into a sort of bent-over squatting position, and another hand, also the size of your torso, starts thumping you rhythmically on the back, shaking your internal organs.

This happens a couple dozen times a day.

Or you wake up hungry, start casting around for food, and somebody shoves a hunk of rubber the size of your fist and covered in stale saliva into your mouth. When you do eat, it's with the heedless desperation of the truly starving.

And just when you're settled, those same hands pick you up and strip you half-naked. They take liberties with your private parts and a cloth doused in cold water, and then dress you again in a bulky, ill-fitting undergarment.

Whoever depicts infancy as a peaceful time filled with happy gurgling and quiet warmth has to be crazy.

Detachment parenting

Some days (not today, thank goodness) you just can't win. Charlie starts crying, so you pick him up and he starts crying louder. Offer him a pacifier, he screams. Offer him a bottle, and he screams while arching his back into a semicircle while whipping his head from side to side like the lead in some devil-baby slasher flick.

Swaddle him, rock him, sling him, shush him and all you get is more evidence that his lungs have recovered from RDS just fine. And why did you spend all that money on the NICU when you were just going to murder him anyway, he asks in tones that might well reach downtown.

So rather than throwing him across the room or tearing him limb from limb like he says you're doing, you put him down and step into the next room just to get away from the screaming.

Silence.

You step back in, very softly, and there he is lying on the changing table or the couch, gurgling quietly and looking up at ceiling. Waving his arms and legs a little. In that mood the books call "quietly alert". What he really wanted wasn't food or a return to the white-noise confines of the womb or "non-nutritive sucking", it was for you to stop goddam bugging him.

Our local doctor once commented that ICSI babies tend to be developmentally delayed, because their parents never put them down. If that were really anywhere near true, it would be a wonder that any survive...

Passing the Torch

Back when Julie and I were first thinking about leaving Manhattan, we helped install plumbing in the house a couple of ex-urbanite friends were building for themselves in the backwoods of Maine. Along with us came the propane torch that had been sitting in my mother's basement for 20 years.

I was watching over Julie's shoulder as she sweated a joint somewhere in the half-built attic when the torch's main seal sprang a leak and flames started spitting from the junction between torch and propane tank. Without a second's hesitation, she handed the potential bomb to me, I blew the fire out, and we took the torch down to the front yard to fizz its way peacefully into oblivion.

Handing Charlie off sometimes seems a lot like that (maybe with a little less shrapnel risk). One of us will hand the other a compact shrieking bundle of fury: "Here. You deal with this." I feel bad when I do that to Julie. When she does it to me, I feel a little terrified but mostly useful.

When else should we hand him off? In Baby Utopia, one of us could put him down to sleep and the other one could pick him up when he wakes again happy and ready to eat. Or drop him in the baby gym for takeover when he's bored with his rattles and squeakers and music stars. And a pony.

But c'mon, who would want to stop hanging out with Charlie when he's being sweet instead of pissy? Or dare to move him when he's just started to go to sleep after a half hour's vocal exercises? Or in the middle of a bottle that he's slurping down without arching and yelling his fool head off?

We don't mean to pass him back and forth like a ticking bomb or a hot potato. That's just the way it tends to work out for now. And a good thing he won't remember.

Leading with his chin

I've been carrying Charlie around a lot in the past few weeks, either in the sling or in my arms across my chest (if his mouth is jammed up against my armpit the pacifier doesn't come out so often). The good news is that he's gotten so used to being jounced into relative calm by my clumping around the upstairs -- eight laps with detours into every other room is a quarter mile -- that sometimes he stops screaming and heaves a big sigh of relaxation as soon as I pick him up crosswise.

The bad news is that his head sticks out. Our house was custom-built for a small man, we're told, and the doors are not very wide. The hallway is narrow and has sharp corners. Every time I go through a door, carrying Charlie point foremost, I'm half sure that this is the time I'm going to thwack his little skull. No matter how I angle my arms, Charlie is in the lead. It doesn't help that I've rammed my own shoulder or hip into a doorframe more times than I can count when I wasn't carrying the boy.

Thus far I've avoided disaster by fixing my eyes in terror on the clearance between Charlie and every bit of molding or sheetrock that threatens to clobber him as we walk. Gives an extra hitch to my steps that no doubt helps keep him disoriented and docile. As long as I never gain any confidence in my ability to keep him out of harm's way he should be fine. At least until he starts running into walls and doorframes under his own power.

1800 seconds

In my head, Charlie's life is full of clocks: a clock starts ticking when he finishes his meal, so I'll have an idea when he might be hungry again, when he goes to sleep -- count every second gratefully -- or when he fills his diaper, so that I have some idea when he might be angry and straining again. Even when he's in his gym kicking at the toys, or watching his mobile, there's a little timer in the back of my mind ticking off the minutes till he starts getting those overstimulated shakes.

I try to think more in terms of chess clocks than of the blinking LEDs that grace every made-for-TV bomb ever created. You know, the bombs with all the booby traps so that they'll go off the moment you try to move or disarm them.

Which brings me to the longest half hour in Charlie's day: the time between when he gets a dropper full of Prevacid to control his reflux and when he can start sucking down his next bottle. (It took us a few days of complaining that his new medicine wasn't working worth a damn to read the warnings not to give milk less than 60 minutes before or 30 minutes after a dose.) But if you're Charlie waking up hungry and swallowing a nice gulp of what tastes like yummy food, only to be told the next gulp is in forever, package inserts are slim comfort.

How long is 30 minutes? Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi is a minute, and don't think he's not potentially alert and ready to blow for every one of them. We change him, we make him stare at his mobile, we give him a bath, today I slung him and took him for a nice sedative walk in the park. Tomorrow, who knows?

Perhaps I shall get him a watch and just explain calmly and reasonably that he can't eat until the requisite time has gone by. Do you think I should get him a digital watch or analog?

The ravening monster

How soon they grow up.

This morning between 5 and 11 Charlie consumed about 11 ounces of milk. That's the equivalent of five gallons a day for an adult. We'd gotten so used to our petite little boy taking three, maybe four ounces at a feeding (it used to be hard enough to force just two ounces down his throat in the bad old days). Yeah, sure, in the past few weeks I've been filling those four-ounce Avent bottles to the shoulder, but I could still be in denial about how much Charlie was eating. This is getting to be too much. (Literally: the top of the threads is six ounces exactly.)

I know Charlie's gluttony is a good thing, even if it means yet another body of hard-won knowledge has become obsolete -- and that I'm going to have to start mixing formula in half-gallon jugs. But it still does take one a little by surprise.

Whoever sent the big-baby bottles, thank you.

The drama of the normal child

What, you mean there isn't any complicated medical reason for Charlie to wake up five times in the middle of the night, he just does it because he feels like it? And that smiling gurgle isn't uniformly a sign that he's about to throw up? How am I going to understand this kid if there aren't Rules?

The obsession I fall into most often is that of the third royal physician in The Madness of King George III -- if I have to smell it (not optional) and clean it up, I might as well worry about why it's tarry or curdy large or small or whatever other variation he's decided to produce. But I can also fuss about how often Charlie is burping or eating or whether he's holding his head up as high off the floor as he did yesterday.

I know that Charlie isn't an intensively-monitored patient, but it's so much easier to relate to him that way, or to think of him as a particularly smart but clumsy puppy. When he laughs to see one of us, or tries desperately to win a smiling contest, it's frighteningly apparent that there's beginning to be a tiny little human being in there. And then I think about how long it took me to learn to tie my shoes.

Charlie's drinking problem and other late-night thoughts

Yes, he has one. Just like Robert Hays in Airplane. He grips the bottle in his pudgy little fingers, pushes it out of his mouth, regards it for a moment, then pulls it back in. To his cheek, or his chin, or his nose, or anywhere else where he can't actually drink from it.

It was much funnier when he had a sucking problem (QuickTime, 3 MB, noisy), because then we could just watch the errant path of his fist and laugh. And plug in a pacifier if he got too desperate. Having Charlie help when he's starving and I'm trying to feed him at 2 in the morning really doesn't tickle my funnybone in quite the same way, although I realize it should.

At 2 in the afternoon, of course, I think it's hilarious. And in another couple of months, when he gets the coordination thing down and I can just toss him a bottle from the other side of the room to drink by himself, I'll think it's great.

Charlie and I are neither of us at our best in the wee hours of the morning. So as I listen to him yelling while he refuses to burp, try to rock him to sleep, or pat him in his crib in the vain hope that he will stay down this time, I try to think about something other than how many seconds until he goes to jail or college.

After the fourth or fifth variation on "but that's not important right now" my mind wanders to such observations as, "I never would have thought that having a kid would make my quadriceps hurt so much" or "I wonder whether my knees will hold out till Charlie starts walking." Or "Maybe if I were in an electric wheelchair I could drive to Kansas."

Then comes what passes for wordplay when one party hasn't learned to talk yet and the other is half asleep muttering under his breath. For the past couple of weeks I've been obsessing over what "Soddenfreude" would mean, if only it were a word. I like to think that it describes the happy feeling that makes Charlie smile and kick his legs when I remove a pound and a half of diaper with its magic moisture-absorbent crystals loaded to the brim. Julie says no, it's the happy feeling I get watching Charlie fill his pants while she's feeding him, and knowing that I don't have to clean up the resulting carnage.

Keep your powder dry and your wipes wet

Most of you will laugh that I even bother to post about this.

Yesterday we were taking Charlie for a ride -- ostensibly to the cheese-and-chocolate outlet by way of the gas station that for no good reason appears to charge 20 cents a gallon less than anywhere else in the state. He's been a bit fussy since getting stabbed three times in the leg for his six-month birthday, and we thought it might calm him. (As a science geek, I also pointed out that if he started crying really loud we could just run the car up to mach 1 and outrun the soundwaves.)

Of course, halfway through the trip Charlie went from twisting his head around to look forward at me with big appealing eyes to calling out for attention to calling out rather more urgently for food. No problem, we just waited him out for a few miles and pulled into the first available parking lot, at a disused carwash, and I got the bottle out of his carefully prestocked bag. He fit neatly across my lap as he ate, only occasionally kicking his carseat or thumping his head against the passenger door.

Cue one gastrocolic reflex. Also no problem -- the bag has long been stocked with diapers -- in his current size yet -- and moist wipes. Which were after a month or so of no in-car events about as moist as a civil-defense cracker from 1955.

We are gifted improvisers, and Charlie did just fine being changed and mostly cleaned under the shelter of a liftgate and an open carwash booth. Whoever empties the dumpster at the apartments across the way, my thanks and apologies.

So now we know to rotate our stock of moist wipes, and all the more-experienced folks out there are shaking their heads at the exponentially more messy hijinks that await us. But every day we do something new with Charlie without utterly screwing up I like to imagine at least a tiny glow of accomplishment, and that was yesterday's.

A few notes to makers of infant clothing

From a darkened room in the middle of the night.

Sleeves. Pantlegs. Make them visibly and obviously different even when all the snaps are undone.

There's going to be a diaper in there. Leave room for it even if doing so spoils the elegant line of your garment.

Zippers are only more convenient if  I don't need two hands to hold the outfit on either side of the seam, one hand to pull on the zipper tab, and another hand to steady the squirming boy. Even if some of those can be the same hand.

Internal cuffs and hems that snag fingers and toes: bad idea.
(Oh, and clothes for preemies with a closure sewn across the crotch: a bad idea that can be fixed readily with a pair of shears)

The feet in footie pajamas? They should face forward.
Oh. Scratch that. Instead, just make it much more obvious that the snaps on your garment open up the back.

Also! — and this is Julie now — also, what the hell is up with the pockets? What exactly should I expect Charlie to keep in all those pockets? Keys? Identification? Cell phone? Smokes?

Tertia, do not say condoms.

I can't figure it out. One thing is perfectly clear: I am gonna freak the fuck out the first time I reach into one of his pockets before doing laundry and find a matchbook with a phone number written on it. I have told him and told him never to play with matches. But does he listen? I can only assume he's irresistibly attracted to a certain kind of dissipated floozy with a lush and yielding rack.

But why?

All I know is that the minute I start finding colored hankies* in those tiny pockets, it's time for us to have a talk.

_____
* Not safe for work, but then surely† you're not surprised.
† No, and don't call me...well, you know.

Vocalizer Bunny

Charlie is learning about his upper register. Also about palatal-and-back fricatives. So instead of a baby who says "geh" or "owa" or "EH" we have a baby who sounds like shrieking metal in an extrusion press or Donald Sutherland alerting his fellow pods to the last original human or some second-rate demon possessing an ingenue. And he smiles while he does it.

Long ago I read about artificial-intelligence researchers who were trying to make self-organizing systems that taught themselves how to speak. One of the things they did to simplify their job was to eliminate from consideration the majority of sounds that their machines could make, on the grounds that those noises belonged to no possible human language and hence would never be uttered. Let me just say we got your utterances right here.

I think next week I'm going to teach him how to project.

Turning point

What a difference a couple of weeks make. Charlie now walks, speaks in simple sentences, and is learning to cook. Julie tells me he has begun studying chess, but I don't believe her; he falls for a mate-in-five gambit every time.

Well, no. But the changes still are pretty remarkable to me after just 10 days away. He's much more sure of his hands when he reaches for something, he can roll over from front to back and back to front, and he can stick four out of five toes in his mouth. He's getting ticklish. Even more important is the long-awaited change in family pecking order: Charlie now weighs visibly more than Skillet.

Charlie's face has also changed in a way that's hard for me to describe — he's matured, and even the same expressions he had before seem to have more subtlety to them. When he looks pensively at Thermos (we had the foresight to get a cat who is also a mobile black-and-white pattern) you can tell he's not just staring unfocused into space. When he gets mad that it isn't dinnertime yet, there are a lot more voluntary muscles in play.

And when he blows a bronx cheer in the middle of a meal, we're scraping oatmeal off the ceiling for days...

Temporary Skills

In the past four or five months, I've developed a pretty impressive knack (If I may say so) with Charlie's medication. I drop a pill into a big bottle cap, get the temperature of the water just right, and splash in no more than half an ounce. After waiting for the pill to dissolve into its tiny constituent capsules, I gently suck capsules and a sixth-ounce of water into a dropper. The capsules settle to the bottom, where they are held by surface tension until I put the dropper in Charlie's mouth and squeeze as he sucks the liquid down. Another dropperful for stray capsules, and a third to rinse everything down his gullet. It's gotten easier as he's become better at cooperating, and I've grown ever defter with repetition. It's a wonder to behold.

Guess what: Charlie can now suck on his own damn pills for the minute or so it takes for them to dissolve. And what with starting to teethe, he has plenty of saliva to wash the bits down. Another painstakingly acquired, absolutely crucial skill rendered obsolete. I feel just like a  manufacturing worker replaced by a robot, only completely different.

Yet another milestone

So now Charlie is eating Cheerios. It's endlessly fascinating. Every now and then he'll just pick one up between thumb and forefinger and pop it in his mouth, but more often he'll rake it into his palm (QuickTime, 3 MB) and then put his hands together to dig it back out onto the fingertips, and then it'll end up on the back of his fingers and rub off on his upper lip, and then he'll come back with the other hand and push it into his mouth. Or he'll just pick one up and drop it and stick his hand in his mouth and be completely unaware that he just took a big bite of nothing.  I feel like a naturalist in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, sitting entranced for hours watching the activity in a single clump of tundra grass.

OK, it's not endlessly fascinating to anyone but me.  Is his belly a hand's thickness clear of the rug as he pushes up with his knees and elbows, or is it on the floor? No one else really cares: they're satisfied with a simple "he's learning to crawl." (And did I mention our fantasy that the gate I just installed will keep Charlie out of the litterbox without pissing off the cats?)

Eventually I'll get a life beyond Charlie. Or maybe I'll just make things up in a desperate attempt to make his daily milestones interesting to other people. Instead of "Charlie now gets pissed off when I get between him and the electrical outlet, even if he's still a couple yards away" it'll be "Yesterday Charlie developed a cure for the common cold." Or "Charlie is running for Senate next year on the Natural Law ticket." "Charlie just calculated a billion digits of pi in his head. The last one was 3."

And then, when he gets old enough to read the internets, my son can just bemoan my lack of imagination instead of thinking something like this.

Shout out to Nance, Terry, and Annie G. for the bibs, General Mills for the toasted whole grain oat cereal, G. Love and Special Sauce for the music, and Charlie for the toothless milky grin.

Some were predators and some were prey

The other day we took Charlie to the local bookstore, and he sat around on the floor while we picked out board books for him. Among others, a couple from the Sheep series (I'm going to have to take elocution classes before I can do justice to the need for dramatic readings) and a new copy of Big Red Barn to replace the old  one that Charlie enjoyed so much before he entombed its pages in a block of polymerized vomit. 

Last night, as Charlie sat up expectantly to read the new BRB for the first time, I had a moment of hippopotamus. Er, uncertainty. He's starting to understand a bunch of words — just ask the cats who were trying to slink by until I said, "Hey, Charlie, look at the kitties!"

So should I read him the version that's on the page, or the one that ought to be? Eventually he's going to find out the difference.

I spent 15 years working as an editor. Once I went up to a friend after a short-story reading and said, "That was great! There were only about half a dozen things I wanted to change." It just comes naturally to fix the scansion and omit needless words, or to add the occasional explanatory passage the author must have forgotten. And then there's the fact-checking: around these here parts, dogs say "Woof!" And things Charlie ought to know, like the potential dangers to monarch butterflies from genetically engineered corn pollen. And — but I digress.

What would you do? Slavishly follow the text? Favor him with a brand new reading each time? Maybe I'll just scan the book and print up new pages with the right words on them.

A high-tech grasp of the obvious

No kidding: Premature babies 'feel true pain', says a report of a new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience. They don't just flinch and tense their bodies and scrunch up their tiny faces and yell as loud as their underdeveloped lungs will let them. Now we know, thanks to a series of brain scans done on preemies, that parts of the brain later associated with high-level sensory processing light up when you stick a preemie's heel.

None of this surprises anyone who's, say, spent six weeks in a NICU, but what got to me was the unacknowledged technical tour de force involved in measuring the brain activity of babies down to 25 weeks without freaking the local research ethics committee right out. Preemies are, uh, delicate. When Charlie was born, you could look at him wrong and half a dozen alarms would go off. He'd desat when you turned the lights on.

The J. Neuroscience web site isn't giving me any damn help at all, so my imagination is running wild. First I think they must have used an MRI — visions of baby inserted into enormous magnet with LOUD, CLANKING moving parts. Baby, whose life depends on the metallic needles, probes, patches and wires inserted into or covering its body, inserted into enormous magnet. Hmmm, maybe not. You can also measure brain activity with PET scans — baby whose life is hanging by a thread shot up with radioactive glucose for the sake of science and inserted into enormous (but nonmagnetic and possibly nonclanking) machine. Um.

EEG? I've had a couple of those. Dozens of electrodes pasted onto baby's skull, while the researcher explains, "Kid, we need you to remain calm and unruffled while we glue all these patches to your head, but as soon as the nurse sticks your heel it's OK to register discomfort."

I'm clearly missing a brain-scan method or twelve here — anyone out there know the answer? It amazes me that gizmos have advanced to the point where you can safely do this kind of research on such fragile little blobs, and kinda awes me that the parents of these kids were willing to give consent to something that wouldn't help their babies a bit but might somehow make life in the NICU more comfortable for someone else's very sick baby.

UPDATE 315pm: A kind reader has sent a copy of the article, in which very reassuring things are said about how the infants were treated. There is also a picture of a photogenic 33-weeker being probed. The sensors, aka "optodes", are not very big at all, and apparently monitor blood flow (which translates to brain activity) right below wherever they're placed. So they're essentially the hyper-evolved cyborg cousins of a pulse-ox clip. Much simpler than I'd thoughtt, and a good thing too.

Every now and then one of our friends or family members comments on how nice it is for Julie that I help her with Charlie. I smile and remind myself that beating them about the head and shoulders with a spare newel post would only cause trouble. It's not just that such comments rekindle, ignite and fan with blast bellows my fear of being an inadequate parent. It's that they make me want to find some way to prove them wrong.

And I really hate keeping score. Well, yeah, partly because I think I'd come off a poor second. But if I didn't, what difference would it make?

Just how would you do it anyway? Any decent judging system for Xtreme Charlie would make the new figure skating rules look like Go Fish. I start imagining something like this:

• Major eruptions from top or bottom: 10 points plus
  • 1 point for every item of Charlie's clothing tagged.
  • 2 points for every item of parent's clothing tagged.
  • 3 point bonus if you have to shower.
  • No points for Charlie's socks.
• Minor eruptions, bodily or emotional: 2 points.
• Meals: 2 points
  • 1 point off for good behavior
  • 2-point bonus if he gets the lid off the sippy cup.
  • 1 point for food in hair and ears
• Bath: 1 point
  • 1 point bonus if he cries throughout
  • 1/2 point off if he says "Buh-bul" more than three times.
• General care: 1 point per hour
  • 1/2 point off if he sneaks up and tickles your stomach
  • 1 point bonus if he's a pill.

Then there would be the saintliness points for singing sweetly to Charlie during a bonus round, and some kind of style credit for singing on key...

Around here we pretty much limit the tallies to  "I caught the last three diaper blowouts, you get this one" or "You took him to daycare, I'll pick him up." (Julie: bath and med/bottle setup. Paul: pajamas and bedtime bottle delivery).

The other week, while Charlie was blessedly sleeping off a couple hours of his (and Julie's) most recent encounter with a random stomach bug, Julie commented, much to my surprise, that I do more for the boy than she does. I told her that I always felt just the opposite. I think this is one of the many good things about both having lived on our own for years before moving in together. If you're used to doing an entire household's worth of chore singlehanded, it feels a little like slacking to do any less.

The 7.5 percent solution

Charlie has always been pretty cooperative about taking his medicine, at least since it stopped being delivered by needle and tube. And he's taken a lot of it: antacids, antibiotics, painkillers, inhalants...

He sits quietly sucking his bottle and breathing from his nebulizer. He opens his mouth obediently for a hit of Motrin. But there's only one drug he's really addicted to. He's started serious teething again, and when he so much as glimpses that little pink-and-purple tube of benzocaine from across the room he lets out a shout and points avidly in its direction. No gentleman junkie here: be quick with his fix or he'll climb you.

All the books will tell you that topical anesthetics aren't that useful, that they wash away in a few minutes and make the rest of your baby's mouth feel funny. Charlie can't read, so Charlie doesn't care. He gives a little coo of deliverance as he opens his mouth for gelid relief. Sometimes he wants both sides, usually just one. As soon as he feels the numbing rush he loses interest in the little tube and goes back to playing or talking or chewing on his spatula.

Every now and then I feel a brief puritanical qualm about dosing Charlie with this stuff on demand, relieving his pain whenever he asks for it instead of teaching him to suck it up and grit his teeth like a man. What if benzocaine turns out to be a gateway drug to the harder stuff, like acetominaphen or ibuprofen? But then I come to my senses. He's already taking the hard stuff. And none of his six and a half teeth even meet. He couldn't grit them even if he wanted to.

There is one place where I intend to keep him from new thrillseeking concoctions, and that's in the kitchen. His newfound love of pesto alla Genovese, for example, I will not abide. He's cutting into my share.

The very messy bunny

I really should have known this already: if Charlie visits a household with other children, he's going to need a new set of clothes by the time he comes back. Julie has been taking a short break from our vacation, and before heading for Oregon I decided we should visit a few friends from my dashing bicoastal days. First up, D., whom I've known since college, now with a 6-year-old, a 3-year-old and the first dog Charlie hasn't absolutely loved on sight (he must have been jetlagged).

And a sandbox. Throwing sand up in the air is apparently the funniest thing a 20-month-old can do, handily edging out peekaboo with someone almost his own size, and well ahead of trying to uproot ornamental plants. Charlie's clothes looked right out of Lawrence of Arabia by the time he was done (only with festive polka dots), and it took close on half an hour to rinse most of the grains out of his hair. He came home in a fetching ensemble of nearly-new overalls and tee shirt.

My other friends have no sandbox, only gazillions of wooden blocks -- including some from G.'s childhood -- a bunch of plastic dinosaurs and a bowl of cherries on the kitchen table. So far, so good. And Charlie is remembering the names of both of their boys. He's walking half a dozen steps at a time. I'm basking in the compliments and holding an almost adult conversation about robots and integrated circuits. Maybe I'll get Charlie out of this with only a few fruit stains.

Then he spots the watering can out on the deck. "Wuh!" he cries imperiously. (Sometimes I think his language skills could be a little less advanced, thank you, especially when I take him down from a nice long ride on my shoulders and he immediately responds, "Up! Sho'!") Anyway, there is nothing for it but to start filling watering cans and watch him pour them on himself. With occasional breaks to mix up some mud and rub his pants into it.

"Oh, I can just wring his clothes out," I say bravely. But no, upstairs is apparently a trove of cardboard boxes labeled by child and year. Out come pants, a shirt, a windbreaker, a cap that turns out to be just a little too small, more overalls... "Please! take them," says my friend B. I do, and better yet, this time I even remember to collect all of his cups, plates and utensils before taking him out to the car.

On the way back to the hotel, Charlie hugs his hand-me-down rabbit while demanding crackers at every traffic light. Then he stands proudly on the sofa so that he can smile, growl, wave his hand and play peekaboo with the baby in the mirror. And I bless the luck that has put our room directly across the hall from the laundry. And given me friends who put up with me even as they welcome Charlie.

More water please

September in New England means cool weather. As our neighbors shut down their pool for the season, we drain and hide our little aquatic play table (somehow the idea of Charlie soaking himself and us to the skin with 55-degree water — that's minus nine celsius for you metric folks — just wasn't attractive). So the last time Charlie went out on the deck, he picked up his lonely, left-behind watering can, carried it over to his high-and-dry Godzilla doll, and spoke the title of this post.

Every time I hear Charlie pick up a new word or phrase, I'm astounded not just by him, but by the amazing complexity of language and the the near-miraculous way that kids manage to pick it up  and to make sense of the hash that is adult conversation. Sometimes we put his shoes on, sometimes we put on his shoes. He likes to take a nap, we like to take a picture of him. He takes a ride in a car.  Dogs bark. Trees have bark. Trees are made of wood. Would Charlie like a cracker? It won't be our turn to turn until the light turns green.

Sometimes I'm surprised he doesn't start screaming in frustration: "Use the same damn words when you're saying the same thing! Use different words when you mean something different! This morning you gave me 'some' milk with breakfast, now you're giving me 'a cup of' milk, and it's the same thing. First you tell me you're making a bite of food, then you tell me 'Don't bite people' -- can't you make up your enormous effing minds?!"

But instead he, like pretty much every other toddler on the planet, just sucks up new words as if he were a huge semantic sponge. Watermelon. Farmer's Market. Hippopotamus. (Then he tosses them back at us in nearly unrecognizable variations. If only I'd paid more attention to those tables of vowel and consonant shifts back in Linguistics 110, I'd know immediately that feces benekeh means fleece blanket.)  I know that Charlie is the descendant of thousands of generations of primates whose lives and reproductive success depended on learning the language of the adults around them, but even so, watching the process close up is fascinating and humbling.

Just not humbling enough to make me fill up his watering can.

How soon they grow up

It started with three little words: "Oh, my gosh." There are plenty of exclamations Julie and I use (and mostly try not to use around Charlie), but that's not one of them. When he started talking about caps and peddlers, we could not deny the awful truth: his daycare has books we don't have at home, and his teachers read them to him.

Then he started asking us to help him do somersaults. What will they teach him next?

We try to get him to open up to us about his life, just like they tell parents in those public service announcements, but he's already mastered the art of inscrutability.

"What did you do at daycare today, Charlie?"
"Played."
"Did you go outside?"
"Yis."
"What books did you read?"
"Charlie had a poopy diaper."
"Did you read a book about caps?"
"Charlie had a diaper change. Charlie has a fresh diaper. Sprayed the diaper table wiffa sprrrrray bottle."

OK, I guess that counts as telling us at least a little bit about his day. But it's not enough. I want to know who his friends are, whether he's hanging out with the wrong element in the nap room, what dastardly schemes he and his wee pals are hatching. ("Look your parents in the eye and smile when you kick hell out of the table leg at dinner," they tell each other — Charlie could never have  thought of that on his own, could he?)

Of course if he really is as fast-talking as the pediatrician seems to think, maybe he'll be the one that other parents worry about their kids associating with. He'll have a little 3-foot-high posse, all trailing identical stuffed Ernie dolls and all exuding a whiffy atmosphere of menace as they politely tell their parents, "Dad will get out of Charlie's rocking chair now."