All manner of manners

Greg just informed me he had one for the parenting "win" column this morning.

He said June made a derogatory comment to him, not aware of its meaning. Greg calmly explained that it wasn't a nice thing to say and why, and that people who are what she said Greg was often are hurt or struggling and need our sympathy and kindness. June was genuinely contrite and listened to Greg's sensitive explanation with intent and interest. They walked away from the moment stronger and better informed.

I, on the other hand, just presented our 1-year-old with a pile of newspapers and a crock of sharpened pencils to play with while I met a deadline.

We can't all be winners.

But my point is, we're reaching that era in our parenting where we have to teach our eldest that she needs to know when to put a cork in it — this after four years of encouraged free expression. Now we're backpedalling, putting contradictory footnotes on all the rules we once set, telling her, "Weeeeeellll... maybe farting at the dinner table isn't that funny after all."

In fact, just the other day, I said the following to June whilst biting the inside of my cheek:

"Bug, there's a difference between a good toot and a bad toot. And we have to understand there's a time and place for good toots and a time and place for bad toots. We have to toot where we can toot, but not toot where we can't toot."

I'm the Thomas Kuhn of gas.

June's a sweet and sensitive kid. She took to the manners thing early and easily, and now you can't exhale in here without her thanking you for giving the plants carbon dioxide. She's appreciative, and she's acutely aware of others' feelings.

And she's also observant. One recent grocery store trip had her pointing to a uniformed employee doling out Home Run Inn pizza samples and saying, "Whoa, mom, look at her butt." This was minutes after she said, pointing to a customer, "Check out that man's crazy hair!"

It was a woman.

That's easy enough to correct, right? You say, June, we don't make comments about the way people look. If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Done and done.

There's always a caveat, though.

The same trip she spied a very stylishly dressed college-aged girl. As she passed, June said, "Wow, that's a fancy, pretty lady."

There's a compliment any person would love to hear. But to June, there's no distinction between being a fancy lady and having a noteworthy butt. We see one as being better than the other, but she doesn't. For all she knows, that pizza peddler's butt is fantastic and we should all long to have it. Is telling her she can't say that the invitation to a lifetime of butt paranoia and body issues? Is the blanket "Don't talk about other people, period" an adequate message? Because who doesn't love a random act of kindness?

And if you've got a butt of distinction, I've got a gal who'll tell you all about it.

Luckily she's now four, and these sorts of psycho/social nuances are, believe it or not, starting to make sense. Not because of anything we did, in fact more likely it was her wonderful schoolteachers, but because the confetti gun that controls her neuro impulses has been holstered, and all the little particulate is starting to fall into followable form. That mess of words and meanings and interpretations now is becoming linear, like a solved Soul Train Word Scramble.

It's fascinating to watch it settle, and then look at Tess and see it storm. At 15 months, the baby sign language thing has proved beneficial, and while no self-respecting sign expert would recognize one command she gives, we do, and that's the point right now. She knows how to ask for food and drink, tell us she's through, and can sometimes specify her needs further. She's also a pretty verbal kid, so the gestures coordinate with a decent number of words and sounds. Once we moved from the basics, it was time to teach her "help," "please" and "thank you." The latter came pretty easily, with her saying "dee doo!" each time she takes or gives something to someone. "Help" and "please," though, are tougher since they're also trying to unseat a longstanding habit of hers where she belches out this staccato grunt when she wants something. The louder and angrier it is, the faster you better move.

The best way I can think to describe it is the throat-clearing sound an ornery old woman with hearing loss would make if she's trying to get a bus boy's attention.

"Young man! AH-HA! Young Man! AH-HA! Come back here — I wasn't through with my muesli!"

Tess is so heartbreakingly sweet and funny and affectionate, and is as fantastic a kid as I could have envisioned, but this sound makes me want to peer over my glasses at her and say, "You need to fucking shut up with that."

I've actually said close.

So lately she's been getting a little wordless taste of that from me — a "not gonna fly" sternness from mom heretofore unseen. It was jarring, initially, and she returned my gaze with a slow curling of her lower lip, a large Demi-Moore-in-"Ghost"-style tear tumbling from her eye, and the slow-build bleat of Wookie cry (truly, I have proof). After more hard-hearted stonewalling, she will now scratch at her chest and say "cheese" – the Tess Trotter interpretation of the ASL's circular palm-over-collarbone sign for "please."

Success.

Now, this is all well and good and self-aggrandizing, but it brings us right back to the farting.

When she cuts one she looks right at me and laughs. As much as the defense of "cavemen thought it was funny!" (ahem, Mike Leonard) may be invoked here, nurture's got nature on the ropes. Without a certain mother's roar of approval, a toot falling in the forest might not make a sound. Or get a laugh track. So we're right on pace to be having these same relativist manners conversations with Tess in roughly three years.

But come on. Are there any parents out there that can behold a flatulent baby and NOT laugh? It's where my dad's laissez-faire approach to manners has some merits. Gas is humankind's oldest, and arguably best, joke. Before we had language, fire, wheels, and thumbs made nimble from sexting, some brazen hominid ripped one in a dark cave and discovered laughter. Where is this on the evolutionary timelines? Should't it be highlighted somewhere between the knuckle-dragging hairy man and the slightly more upright knuckle-dragging hairy man? A red arrow pointing to a notch on the line denoting some icy epoch in which a finger was first pulled?

Manners might be what separates us from animals, but so is humor.

Our kids growing up polite and respectful is very important to us. As is an appreciation of the finer things. It's evolution.

And butts are pretty damn funny.

Wean a little wean with me

Hey, all. Happy holidays and stuff.

Confronted with a terrifying lull in freelance work (which, thankfully, ends next week when my new batch of assignments rolls in), I shall instead take stock of the business of the day: that is, being broke and weaning a baby.

No one wants to hear about our debt-to-income ratio sadness, so I'll instead talk about the weaning.

Wait, no one wants to hear about that either.

Oh well! Doing it anyway!

Tess is a healthy 14 months old now, and she's still at the teat. Not exclusively, obviously, and really not at it with any conviction either, as those fun bags ain't that fun anymore. The once healthy-ish rack now better resembles empty goat bladder canteens strapped to the sides of a bedouin's mule — so full of promise, yet more a haunting reminder of richer days. Once they were ample and life-sustaining; now they are spent and making my existing brassieres a laughingstock.

June, for all her curiosity, verbosity and lack of filter, never once questioned the very open, and open-ended, nursing policy around our house. One day I was Puritanically buttoned up, and the next it was like Russ Meyer's oeuvre in 4D. Make that lactating 4-double-D. All that bosom and she never said a thing. Until recently, when she cast her sad, little eyes hooter-ward and said, "Um, mom, am I going to get... those... when I'm older?" She looked so angst-ridden, and I felt so sorry about dashing her hopes and propagating legit fears of one day having a sorrowful set of howitzers like these, that I flat-out lied to her: "I'm not sure, love."

It was easier weaning June. We stopped at 14 months to the day, and she was ok with it. But June was a different kid; for one, she ate everything I put in front of her. Second, we weren't traveling or introducing any new changes when the time rolled around. Third, her two little snaggleteeth had erupted from her lower gums, so life was good and comfortable. It was boobs one day, no boobs the next and she took it in stride.

Tess, bless her sweet little heart, is quite a bit pickier on eating front. Every day marks that of another foodstuff stricken from her list, as mangos and sweet potatoes and apples and other sure-things are suddenly deemed unpalatable. I was reliably able to supplement her diet with those squishy packets of pureed fruits and veg to ensure that she got some nutrition beyond cheese and bread, but recently when I proffer them, she grabs my hand holding the packet, pulls it toward her, and then forcefully shoves it away with a brow-furrow and a demonstrative "ah dah." Although, I prefer that maneuver to the few times she's cocked her arm back and slapped the food out of my hands and clear across the room. This kid knows how to make a point.

Also, we traveled over Thanksgiving and Christmas and everything I've read on the matter says not to make any big changes (weaning, potty training, big kid bed, etc.) when the wee one is being shuffled about. Duly noted.

Lastly, Tess is still working the World's Most Stubborn Tooth out of her head. I remember thinking at 6 months, as she gummed and drooled and gnawed all over everything, "Whelp, here it comes! Any day now!"

Or week.

Or month.

Or twice her lifetime.

That thing is like a Whack-a-Mole at an arcade, receding and reappearing with weepy fanfare and runny noses. One day I'll see it and think, "At long last!" and then the next it's buried under a layer of swollen, red flesh — the Punxsutawney Phil of the pediatric dental world, squeezing back into the warmth of its dark hole rather than bucking up and facing the light. Up and down, up and down. That tooth has some serious social anxiety disorders.

This, of course, is a two-fold reason for my continued nursing: she needs it for comfort, and I am willing to go along with it since my nerps aren't been shorn off by teeny tiny chompers.

Oh, and I work from home.

Honestly, I love the look of a baby's toothless grin -- even if she's looking less like a baby and more like Uncle Junior in the final episodes of "The Sopranos." Junior with a Joyce DeWitt hairdo, that is.

(That reminds me -- I need to give her a trim)

I hear there are merits to a child being a late bloomer in the tooth department; he or she is less likely to suffer premature tooth decay, and according to my OB/GYN, girls possibly enjoy a later onset of puberty — a fact-backed theory I received with a fist-pump and a cried-out "THANK YOU, JESUS!" Now, this is purely celebrated for selfish reasons, since I recall my own late-blooming teen years as an exercise in controlled sobbing and boobless envy. An issue of Seventeen Magazine couldn't darken my doorstep without me connipping — so many dewy-skinned girls in training bras lapping me in coolness. Never has a minimally supportive undergarment been more pined for than it was in Winnetka during the winter of 1991.

Do I want my kids miserable like that? No! Of course not! Well ... maybe. Greg and I have said that if we could guarantee that our children approach adolescence like I did — wearing turtlenecks under hockey jerseys and sandwiched in between my parents watching "The Secret Garden" on a Saturday night — rather than his method — as a dreamy, long-locked bad boy with a "420" bumper sticker on his S-10 pick-up — we're dodging all sorts of bullets. But there are no guarantees, and I just ask to be granted patience, perspective and a lot of vodka when those days roll around.

But back to the nursing. I always figured that if a kid is old enough to ask for it, he or she is too old to get it. I mean, do your thing, ladies. No judgment from me here. But my OB told me that a couple of her patients are still nursing 4- and 5-year-old kids, and my jaw went slack. I pictured my June saying, "Hey, mom? Can I have spaghetti with red sauce for dinner? And can you bust those cans out so I can get a little (wink-wink) to tide me over?" This is what those women are dealing with. Not to mention the pathetic state their juggs must be in — to borrow an analogy from my sister, like plastic Jewel-Osco bags with a palmful of sand dumped at the bottom. But just when I determined that enough was enough and my kid wasn't going to be like the one that went out the moon door on "Game of Thrones," Tess started asking for it. Not in the usual way babies do, by clawing at your shirt or face-planting into your solar plexus, but by squeezing her hand open and closed, pantomiming a most graceless cow-milking, while giving me her saddest and most plaintive, "Nuh? Nuh?" Shit. I can't say no to that!

But I must.

While we were on the plane heading home from Denver last week, I kept catching the eye of a woman seated across the aisle from us; she was gawking at my stealth nursing system (executed purely for baby containment purposes) with a look of disgust and/or morbid curiosity. She'd whip her gaze back to her iPad on her lap when I'd catch her, clearly sensing the hostility I was returning. "Just try me," I kept telepathically goading, to no avail. But then I thought, "Shoot, I may have given the same looks but a few years ago; this kid can sing 'Happy Birthday,' for pete's sake." Silent judgment aside, the time is nigh.

Moms approaching the end of their infant-parenting years know this as all too bittersweet. We're pretty sure two is it for us, so the end of "baby" and beginning of "toddler" is a transition for me not unlike that of this tooth of hers — an inevitability that I'd prefer to keep just out of sight. I'd get bummed out when June would outgrow her Kissy Kissy jammies, the beret with the scottie dogs all over it, and her first pair of shoes. But then there was a good possibility they would all be reused, and they were, only now to be retired in a fashion reminiscent of Keith Magnuson's number at the United Center, with many tears, a light show and maybe a song or two. I'm sentimental to a fault and have the basement clutter to prove it.

This is another milestone that makes the memories of a tiny baby in the house recede that much more; the photos of her at weeks and months old seem increasingly foreign; her primordial need for me now morphing into something more ambivalent — even if it is only I who senses it.

I figure this is why my mom poured my brother's cereal until he went to college. Your baby will always be just that.

But hell, we're lucky we got this far. Had any variables been different (work schedule, sleep schedule, etc.) we may have cut loose ages ago. So I'm grateful for what we had. Even if my tits looks like two bean bag chairs that exploded all over a basement rec room.

Worth it.