He’ll take the hard road
Why use a screw driver when you can use a power drill? We
adults tend to find the easiest way of doing things. We know that putting your
jeans on after your underpants is the
most efficient way of getting dressed. And how often would you take the slow
route from A to B? Zane would. And does. Little ones don’t know the best way of
doing things; they’re too busy just working out how to achieve something in any
way possible, let alone finding superior alternatives.
If I’m sitting on the floor with my legs outstretched and
Zane wants to get something on the other side of me, rather than crawling
around me he’ll clumsily clamber over my legs with the speed, grace and agility
of a walrus in a bouncy castle. His direct journey takes a great deal longer
than if he had kept to the flat floor. Did he know there was another way?
Perhaps. Perhaps he just wanted a challenge. Or perhaps he just took the path
he found most enjoyable.
Shocking
My dad (Zane’s Pa) calls it his 240 Volt Trick. When all
eyes are on Zane he has the urge to do something impressive, to show off what
he can do with his body. The result is hilarious. He seems to do an impression
of how someone would look when subject to a violent electric shock: his legs
straighten and tense; his portly belly sucks in and his back becomes stiff as a
board; all the muscles in his arms and fingers flex so his hands look like
claws; the transformation that is most humorous is in his face – his eyes open
wide, the whites of his eyes flashing, and his mouth stretches into a crazy
grin; and all this he does while vibrating his whole person as a pretend
alternating current surges through his comical little body.
Felinity
As you become a new parent you automatically activate a
number of feline genes. There are three of them.
The first is reflex: you suddenly develop the ability to
catch your falling child with cat-like speed. If our boy is lying on a bed
across the room and he unexpectedly decides to roll quickly to its edge, I find
myself there in an instant, ready to cushion his swift descent. I never quite
know how I traverse the distance between us; it involves no conscious thought on
my part and must engage a rather trivial quantum leap.
With Zane now crawling about at high speed, he seems to have
a craving for moving towards the brink of stairs without any check in his
velocity. Once or twice I have cleanly caught him just as he became airborne,
despite the fact I was seated comfortably in a chair some distance away a
second earlier, happily nursing a relaxing beverage. Zane probably thinks he is
invincible, throwing himself off high places like a hang glider might, only to suspend
in mid-air for a moment and then be comfortably relocated elsewhere...and then start
it all again.
Secondly, cats have antibiotic properties in their saliva. Now
we are parents, so do we! For many months after Zane’s birth Jas and I would
diligently ensure that anything that went into his mouth was thoroughly
disinfected with expensive chemical-embedded germ-nuking wipes: cups, spoons,
dummies, even his fingers were constantly cleansed. Our immediate environment
was always a bacteria-free zone.
We don’t bother with that now; why spend so much time
fiddling about sterilising everything that enters our boy’s mouth when we have
the ability to clean things with our own tongue? If his dummy hits the floor,
we’ll quickly suck it before safely replacing it in his mouth. If he throws his
spoon on the ground, a quick lick from mum or dad is guaranteed to remove all
dangerous germs from it. A dirty face? Rubbing Zane’s cheeks with saliva-dabbed
fingers is the perfect cleanser.
And three: our hearing is now brilliant. While Jas and I are
still rather crap at hearing when the other has something useful to say when
seated beside each other, we can hear Zane’s cry in a house full of noisy kids
whilst at opposite ends of the building. More importantly, we can hear the silence: if Zane is awake and is making
absolutely no noise at all, he is up to no good and probably eating a book or
rubbing bodily fluids into the carpet.
Mini felinity
Zane also displays cat-like characteristics. He likes pouncing: he’ll pause in mid crawl, and suddenly rise up on his knees, his arms outstretched above his head, and hang there for a predatory second or two...and then he’ll fling himself forward onto his victim – often an unfortunate soft toy or Jas’ head – pouncing with the ferocity of a clumsy kitten mauling a tennis ball.
