The stuff of his daily life

Small Boy has memories. I don't know why this surprises and delights me, but it does. Perhaps if I spent more time reading my baby books I would have been looking for this, waiting for it, but these days I'm spending less time reading my baby books and more time reading my baby.

Small Boy remembers things. Not just faces of the people he knows, not just what comes next when we put him in his high chair, not just that objects continue to exist when we move them out of his field of vision. He remembers events, good and bad, and realizes that events can happen again.

I often take off Small Boy's socks by grabbing a bit of sock down by his toe and pulling and tugging, gently yanking his leg this way and that. This sends him into waves of Small Boy laughter. If I want to send him over the edge, to transport him to the very heights of Small Boy ecstacy, I pull off his socks with my teeth, shaking my head and making little growling noises. I did this the other night, then with a toss of my head flung the sock into his lap. He picked it up. I picked up the other end in my teeth and played tug-of-war with him. The apartment echoed with sqeals and shrieks of uncontrolled Small Boy delight. It's possible that no human being was ever so happy as Small Boy was just then. Every time I released the sock, he lifted it high in his little hand, like the Olympic torch, and pushed it towards my face. Do it again, Mama! Do it again! We finally settled him down again and put him to bed. The next night I was all business, no sock games. The night after that I tugged off his sock with my hands and he grabbed it, held it high, and all but shoved it in my mouth. Do that thing you do with the sock, Mama, do that thing you do with the sock! He remembers the game, and he asks for it. Developmentally, I don't think this is a big deal at nine months, but I'm astounded. He has preferences. He makes requests. He remembers the silly games I play with him, if only for days, all the silly games that make him so unbelievably happy now and that he will not remember when he is fifteen.

He also remembers the bad thing that happened to him. He has a sign with his name on it in wooden letters, the kind that have animals and objects winding around the letters, apple for A, book for B, like little puzzle pieces. My father-in-law made it after Small Boy was born, and it was hanging on the front door of our house when we got home from the hospital. It is very heavy. The wood the letters are fixed to is a piece of two-by-four, the real deal. It is in his room, on the floor at Boy level, tilted against the wall. He likes to play with the letters and try to take the little animal shapes off. You can see where this is going. The other night it tipped forward and pinned his little hand between two-by-four and floor. He cried and screamed and wailed and I was worried something had been seriously damaged, but we were lucky. Some scraped skin, a lot of tears. Surprisingly, he's still drawn to it, and last night crawled over to it to try to pull the animals off. I sat right next to him and kept a hand lightly on the wood to keep it from falling. Once it rocked forward, though, and if I had not been there (this is an adult supervision only toy, but obviously even when I'm there things happen) it would have fallen. When the board moved, Small Boy stiffened and his eyes went wide and he started to cry. He remembered - after it tips, it falls. When it falls, it hurts. He has a small fear - though not enough fear, I noticed, to keep him from fingering the letters.

He is building his world, piece by piece, out of the seemingly silly cotton candy fluff of our days. These things we do, the socks and the animals and the walks in the park, they are the building blocks of his life, and he is busy building. The other day, I saw that he has already poured the foundation. He's got plans, this little boy, he's building his life, and he looks to me to keep the material coming.

Do that thing you do with the sock, Mama, do that thing you do with the sock!