Reflections on one year of motherhood

My son is awesome

When Leo was almost two months old I wrote this post and then later I wrote a couple shorter ones. Now he’s more than 13 months old and a lot has changed over the year—babies develop very quickly!

I feel like I’m starting to get a sense of Leo’s personality: very social and outgoing, curious, active, excitable, musical, distractible, loud and talkative. He really likes people. Strangers have remarked that he’s an unusually friendly and playful baby. When we go out he’ll wave and make contact with people and babble and smile. I don’t think these are my genes! I was a more serious and quiet baby myself I’ve been told (and I’m not super extroverted as an adult either). But I find this aspect of his personality very cute!

Just under 11 months Leo started trying to talk. His first “word” was “bye-bye” which he’d say while waving at people. That’s still his favorite thing to say by far. He says “bye-bye” when people walk past on the street, when doors or drawers are closed, when people leave the house, or when others are heard saying “bye-bye”. Often he just shouts “bye-bye” randomly too. It’s a high recall, low precision sort of situation. I wonder whether he thinks “baby” and “big boy” (things we often say) are also the same as “bye-bye”.

For a few months before his first birthday I’d developed this routine of reciting animal names and noises while changing his diaper. Stuff like “The cow says moo, the sheep says baa, the snake says ssss”. Then around a year old, my mother discovered that he was able to reproduce the noises. He had been listening and learning to replicate the sounds without my knowledge . So he was then able to answer “what does the cow/sheep/dog/snake/lion/chicken say?” (moo, baa, woof, sss, roar, bok-bok-bok). Since then I’ve additionally taught him “what does the bird say? tweet tweet!”. This only took 4–5 demonstrations. Well, he pronounces it more like “ta ta” or “tee tee” but it’s clear he’s trying to tweet (good, because I need him to start tweeting bangers on my account soon). “Cat” is proving harder to transmit since he thinks I’m saying “cow” often because of the common consonant.

After discovering Leo knew all these animal sounds I wondered whether I could teach him to map those onto animals we see in real life. In practice, we only see dogs, so I started pointing at dogs and saying “that’s a dog! woof woof!” whenever we walked around outside. I think it took fewer than 10 examples until Leo himself started saying “woof woof” whenever he saw a dog. In fact, sometimes he spots the dog before I do.

In general at 13 months Leo is pretty resourceful. Annoyingly he hasn’t learned to walk independently yet, only while holding objects or our hands, but he’s mastered a bunch of cheeky tricks nonetheless. (Maybe this is due to my bad athleticism genes—I was a very late walker and only learned to walk independently by 2!) But he’s proficient at opening all sorts of containers, boxes, drawers, doors, and cabinets. He can follow some basic instructions like “brush your hair”, “brush your teeth”, “give it to me”, “touch nose”, “wipe”, “shake”. My mother taught him to crawl up and down stairs in a few public spaces despite us lacking stairs in our apartment, and he’s pretty good at that too. He knows that adults drink coffee from coffee cups and make coffee in the french press. Accordingly he makes a coughing noise whenever he sees those objects, or whenever people say either “cough” or “coffee” (which sound the same to him). He also claps if you say “well done” or “good boy” or if he sees others clapping. Sometimes he also claps in anticipation if he thinks he’s done something good! Not sure if this counts as reward hacking.

Baking with the baby

He knows that adults use phones and laptops that they plug in to charge in the wall socket, so he’s always trying to connect the chargers to our devices and the wall. He’s almost dextrous enough to insert the chargers but doesn’t quite exert enough force. There’s one task he can be helpful with, though, and that’s unloading the dishwasher. He likes picking up and handing people objects. So he’ll take out the dishes one by one and hand them to us happily.

Leo is also very big. He’s in the 99th percentile for height and 90th percentile for weight for his age. He barely fits in 2-year-old sized clothes. Sometimes I wonder whether other people around us think he’s older than he actually is and judge him more harshly for babylike behavior like being unable to eat without making a huge mess. Up until recently I was still front-carrying him in a baby carrier a lot of the time. This made me feel like Milo of Croton. I still carry him sometimes but it’s down to 1-2 hours per day in no more than 30 minute increments, rather than more like 4+. And I’ve started using a stroller for longer walks, something I didn’t do until he was a year old or so. Walking with a stroller makes me feel so light like doing baby walks on easy mode, after baby-carrying for so long. I had adapted to it very well but nonetheless it makes ordinary strolls more straining. Babywearing is also not the same when the baby is exploding out of the carrier and reaching for everything in sight with super-grabby little hands. It makes it very hard to sit down and eat and so on, things that were much easier when he was a few months old and not as large or active.

Joey mode

Having a baby/toddler is an amazing experience. Obviously most people say this already—it’s not an interesting comment. Nonetheless I’ll say it. It’s just so awesome looking at the little guy and seeing yourself and your husband in him and watching him learn things and become his own person. It’s so cool that you can just make people! And it’s so cool that you can try really hard to make the people you make happy.

Since becoming a mother myself I’ve read a lot of other people’s accounts of parenting and babies, both long form, and short form (via so-called “mom twitter”). This has reinforced my general impression that experiences of parenting are very high variance. If you ask people what the hardest part of having a baby is, you’ll hear a very wide range of responses. Many even say that being pregnant is harder than having a newborn (the opposite of my experience—newborn sleep deprivation was very, very straining, pregnancy was a total walk in the park). A lot depends on how well your baby sleeps—Leo is is probably around average on this axis. So I would treat people’s baby anecdotes as a sample from a pretty diverse space of potential baby experiences.

As an example, I sometimes walk past parents eating with their baby at a restaurant, the baby sitting in a high chair and carefully picking up food from a plate and putting it in their mouth. This would be incredibly unusual behavior for Leo who hates sitting in one place and would whine if he’s not allowed to monkey around, while throwing any reachable food on the floor. I think as a baby I was closer to the well-behaved kind, without to my knowledge any special training to that effect. It’s just personality. Maybe it helped that I was more interested in eating whereas Leo isn’t that motivated by food.

Sometimes people ask me what has been most surprising. It’s hard to characterize much of the experience so far as surprising because I just had so few expectations going in. I hadn’t interacted with any babies growing up. I didn’t know anyone with a baby. So I was prepared to just see what happened. But one surprising thing has been Leo’s consistently strong reaction to music. As a newborn, music calmed him down very effectively, and this is still the case. He also started spontaneously dancing at around 11 months (while standing and holding something). This wasn’t something we consciously taught him, but he must’ve picked it up from me because I’d sometimes dance to music while he was in the baby carrier. Now whenever music is playing he’ll clearly start dancing—bobbing up and down to the rhythm, waving his arms, and swaying. It’s super cute and I found the relatively sudden emergence of this untaught behavior pretty surprising!

Leo’s full name is Leonid—he is named after my grandfather, Leonid Borisovich Rimsky, who lectured in music history and theory at the Moscow conservatoire. Leo’s great-grandfather’s entire life was dedicated to music—he cared about little else besides music and his nuclear family. (He also had perfect pitch, as did his own father, and my aunt.) So it feels very fitting that my son Leo is showing musical inclinations so early.