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Cool name, huh? It's a six-letter Chinese word that starts with X and involves a hyphen.
I started calling her 'Baby X' before we knew whether to expect a boy or a girl. On the
second ultrasound visit, Mom and I saw a 3-D portrait of her face, could see she was a girl, and got a metric inventory of her vital organs. I mention this to dispell any misunderstanding of what it's like to have a baby born in Costa Rica.
The little private hospital was totally wonderful, great docs, stupendous nursing staff -- all for $3,000 (caesarean section). If it were possible to find an equally nice private baby hospital in the States, the price tag would have been something like $15,000.
We never considered
bringing X into the world at an American hospital. Couldn't
afford it, and didn't want high technology '100% diagnosis'
that involves selling individually wrapped Tylenol at $17.22
a pop, endless blood tests, and heart-pounding MRI exams
that show everything is normal.
Her first year of life was precious and somewhat strange.
Slightly bewildered by it, we slowly became accustomed to
the idea that we had a perfect baby. Never sick, never spit
up, ate like a champ, seldom cried, slept well, no adverse
reaction to immunization shots. We fell into the habit of
calling her pediatrician 'Dr. Handsome.' Babies have
frequent office visits during their first year. Dr. Handsome
delivered Little X, and he's looked after her ever since.
During the first couple months, he was worried that she
might be anemic. We pointed out that Mom and I were both
caucasian, but Handsome performed a very simple, painless,
one-droplet blood test and found, yep, she's blond and fair.
Some people are, he shrugged.
Well, that first year went by in a blink. She is now a
computer hacker. I am not making this up. Whenever Mom
leaves the room to pee, or make lunch, little Fishy races to
Mom's swivel chair at the computer desk, and she has
developed and run some very impressive macros. Yesterday, I
told her with Daddy-like sincere exasperation for the
billionth time: "Fishy! - Get - down - off - Mommy's - rolly
chair!" and took her place to assess the carnage. This time
the screen had an error message complaining about
punctuation in a file name. It took a while for me to figure
out what this referred to. There was a new icon on the
desktop, a Lotus 123 spreadsheet, with a file name that was
the text of an email message which Mom received earlier,
about 30 words with periods and commas.
I swear to you faithfully that (a) there is no desktop
shortcut to launch Lotus, (b) there is no mini-icon on the
Taskbar to launch Lotus, and (c) we do not use Outlook
Express. All of our email is handled via webmail, opened in
Netscape or IE, zero security problems and no way to access
any of our stored messages unless you log on to a
password-protected host. My toddler had maybe three minutes,
tops, at the keyboard + mouse. The only thing I can
conjecture is that she used Program Start and went from
there, probably found a temp file of the webmail page,
selected some text, copied it, launched Lotus...
This is why I have no life of my own any more. Fishy is a
two-person child care industry. Absolutely perfect in every
way a parent could hope for. Steps into her clothes
cheerfully and promptly, likes bathing, has opinions about
which video to watch at lunchtime -- you name it, this kid
is an angel. But unsupervised, she redecorates. Mom and I do
shifts. I've also replaced the screen in the screendoor
three times, picked up innumerable adult shoes and put them
back in cupboards, reconnected the main phone junction
twice, and had endless discussions with her on the evils of
Reset while Daa-ie is using the 'puter. She comes around,
cuddles my leg, smiles, and -- bam! -- reboot. Complicates
writing.
Attempting to compromise, we gave her a dead laptop when she
was 15 months old. She disassembled it, without tools and
without breaking anything, so next I tried entertaining her
with a little kid toy telephone that made beeps and boops. A
week later, I found the grown-up adult handset in the middle
of my desk, picked it up, said Hello? and had a brief
conversation with someone in Cuba who I did not call, but
apparently Fishy did.
I can't say with any firmness that these are frustrating
experiences. Rather, I've begun to wonder aloud, in harmony
with Mom, what the future may hold. Are older parents really
equipped for this, mentally? Should we hire additional
parents? What are we looking at here, when she's age 7 or 8?
Unbeatable legal and moral arguments that Fishy might win on
the merit of her logic, clearly entitling her to the car
keys?
So, anyway, I'm 53 this year and my life as an educator has
modulated a tad. I'm memorizing LION KING frame by frame at
the moment, Fishy's favorite. Last month, it was Barney. I
think she's grasped production value.
COSTA RICA - Kinda hard not to be happy. My little daughter is 22 months old, and I'm 53 today. Last time I did a birthday report was four years ago in The World's Magazine. Blip. Seems light-years ago. When I turned 49, my head was filled with recollections of my childhood. Since then I got upstaged, reset by Snow Mountain's babyhood.
WEB SITE PICK OF THE WEEK: Our pal Arianna Huffington has another new campaign movie out that's a hoot! Check out Arnold in a g-string, and Bush and Cheney wearing pasties in "The Special Interest Brothel" Check it out!
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