Short Baby Poetry

One droplet,

Translucent, rolls downward

As slowly as time.

It shrinks,

Its trail growing longer

Running out of face.

His smile

Betrays neither awareness

Of the leak, or teeth.

I wipe his chin;

He drools again.

A Few of His Favorite Things

Oh, hello there. I thought today I’d use this space to collect together a few of Donovan’s favorite things. Now that he’s almost eight months old and he has more of a personality than ever, he’s changing all the time. Babies are fickle, capricious characters, and what they love today may be forgotten or even feared or despised tomorrow. So I guess I’d better type fast, so I can post this list before it becomes obsolete.

In no particular order:

Screaming. He’s discovered screaming, and he’d probably do it a lot more if he didn’t have to stop and giggle for about a half hour after every shriek.

Dog toys, so very much more than his own toys. My best business idea is probably the one where I go around buying up huge quantities of baby toys and dog toys, but then I market the dog toys to babies and vice versa because the only thing either of those groups wants is what the other has. Dogs and babies have a lot of money, right? A lot of buying power? This is a great plan.

(Really, anything that isn’t his to play with could fall on this list, especially if it’s something fragile and double especially if it’s something that he can use to try and accidentally inflict harm on himself. He can’t crawl yet, but he’s still very mobile thanks to his superhuman rolling ability, so I’d say he spends about 98% of his waking day journeying from one object I’m just going to take away from him to the next.)

Speaking of the dogs:

When dogs fight. Not like actual fighting, obviously, but these two doofuses (doofii?) like to spend just about all their waking hours roughhousing like lunatics, and based on the noises he makes in his sleep I think Miles even dreams about it, too. It’s Donovan’s favorite thing to watch, just about, as they tumble like the goons they are from room to room, landing often on my wife’s feet, to her pained chagrin. And on the subject of roughhousing like lunatics:

Roughhousing like lunatics. I read somewhere that when poppa lions are playing with their cubs, they pretend that the little guys are hurting them far more than they actually are in order to encourage them and build up their confidence in their fighting prowess. I forget where I read this, but it was probably on my Facebook feed, and so it was probably made up by someone trying to promote lion-based memes. Anyway, I don’t care if it’s true or not, so if it isn’t don’t bother to correct me, because it’s pretty adorable, not to mention that it provided me with a model on which to base my own father-son roughhousing paradigm. (I should clarify, in these sensitive times, that I mean roughhousing in only the mildest sense of the term – letting him grab my face, pretending to struggle to get away, etc. He inadvertently tried to play Mountain-and-the-Viper with me the other day, but luckily his little baby thumbs aren’t strong enough to, you know, crush my eyes and skull.) It’s one of his favorite things to do, but it’s also one of mine as well.

The music of Lily Allen. This one at least isn’t a phase. It’s one of the few things that have been constant about him for as long as I’ve known him (all his life). I can’t recall whether I’ve mentioned my son’s obsession with this British singer before on these pages, but my wife listened to her quite a bit when he was still on the inside, and now that he’s out in the world her music is the only one hundred percent effective method of calming him down when he’s fussy. All except her cover of Brittney Spears’ “Womanizer,” which he just hates for some reason and starts crying whenever it comes on.

What’s that, five things? (Not counting that parenthetical I stuck in there.) That ought to do it for now. I was going to close with a joke, but my dog stole my sandwich just now so I’m suddenly too pissed off to be funny right now. I invite you to share your favorite joke, dad or otherwise, in the comments below.