Matei is changing. Beforehand he was in many ways like my mother's dog : an affable but greedy attention whore, who didn't mind who was holding him as long as they were doing his will and he regularly beamed at all and sundry. (I think my mother's dog incidentally would be delighted to see anyone, including robbers, that she'd be all - You're here to gut the place? Go right ahead! Here, start with this shoe I bring you as a token of my esteem.)
But now Matei is more like a seasoned dater, no longer the slatternly baby that is free and easy with his smiles. Now he is beginning to view strangers with a tad of suspicion and he's a coy tease making them work for it.
He is also developing a strong distaste about having a voice raised at him or his hand smacked lightly (either or both of which I am likely to do when he grabs my bosom in a violent baby grip of death) which he exhibits by throwing his head back and wailing in a particular way that indicates he is feeling quite sad. So I am going out of my way to be gentler. More cuddling. More soft speech. More snuggling.
Which is fine. Because I am not averse to snuggling at all, in fact I am fiercely pro-snuggling, especially when the snugglee is less intent on throwing back his warm fuzzy baby skull to knock me in the teeth. He abuses me it's true, but I do love him so.
Still, shocking a bit, to realise how fast he is becoming both emotionally aware and emotionally injured. That he has a tender heart which bruises as easily as the skin of say a sensitive bosom that is working hard to provide him with nourishment, the ingrate.
It's been an intense sort of learning process this, keeping a baby alive and intact, but slowly, slowly, I feel like I'm getting more competent at it. More parent, less inept-but-well-meaning-babysitter. It's nice, that feeling, of knowing what I am doing, at least some of the time.
And on the subject of things which continue to remain a mystery to me, I am going to try and post a (grainy, badly-lit) video of my child bathing just to see as an experiment if I am a little LJer who can both upload and embed.
I tell you, it's wild to be me.
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
rainsinger- deep sky, firefly
Comments
- but goodness, it had never occurred to me that you and Z would be speaking Serbian (Serbo-Croat?) to the baby! I don't know why - I suppose, because you come across as a native speaker of English (online and in person), and you post dialogues between yourself and Z in English, I'd always assumed that English was the language you used at home, even though I was fairly sure that Z was Serbian too. But it's just struck me listening to this that you speak Serbian too and Matei is going to be bilingual, and huh! It seems ridiculous that that never occurred to me earlier. If you're ever in the zone for talking about what languages you use with Matei and Z, I'd be really interested to read it.
Also - cutest, chubbiest baby evah. He looks so solid and content in the first photo that it's really surprising how small he is on relation to your hands in the video!
Heh, me too. I had a proper moment of going 'why can't I understand what they are saying?' *facepalm*
Matei is quite the little cutie :-)
I speak in tongues! Like the prophets!
Since both of us are of the opinion that Matei will pick up English fairly quickly on his own most likely once he starts going to nursery we are trying to lay firm foundation of SerboCroat in there. On the other hand I always sing to him in English because I don't know nursery rhymes in Serbian and because in my post partum sleep deprived delirium the only songs I knew off the top of my head were in English and now he is hooked on them.
I grew up bilingual - Russian was actually my first language and it was imparted to me via my grandmother so that up until school I was speaking Serbian with a Russian accent. My family are crazy keen on instilling langauges in the young so they started teaching me French Through Play when I was three and I picked up Italian when I was 8 from living with an Italian uncle for a few months and watching Italian cartoons obsessively (as only a child can) for months and months and months before then.
So the fact that I wasn't planning to instill a thrid language in Matei was kind of shocking to my family but honestly I don't want to burden the wee mite. I assume he will probably pick up Spanish at some point because his Godparents are Spaniards and natter at him in their tongue all the time and if he expresses an interest in languages I will be delighted to teach him everything I know and support him with his learning however I can, but I just want to see how he does with bilinguality first.
From my experience with SureStart boys tend to struggle with multilinguality a lot more than girls, and are much more likely to have it cause speech delay so I'm being cautious no matter how much my family pah pahs my reasoning.
gui