Not that I am that guilty of it, but I have to stop doing things for Tiggy quite so much. You know, the sort of help that’s actually an impediment. You think you’re lifting her up but you’re actually holding her back, preventing her from making the discovery on her own and furthering her own abilities. You help her colour in a page in her book, you draw a picture ‘for’ her, you lift her when she could have climbed. It’s that old adage: do you feed someone who’s hungry or do you teach them how to fish?

It’s never quite struck me before how risky this is, but it did earlier in the week in a poignantly sad way.

On Monday, in Gloria Jeans, we were enjoying a babycino and a white chocolate mocha together (the mocha was mine: I may let her taste things, but unlike some people, I don’t think that caffeine is another key food group for children. Even if her babycino is a bit heavy on the chocolate dust and topped by a marshmallow . . . ). I’d stopped by the newsagent two doors up just before, lured by the bargain books outside (one of which was a rare find: Spitfire: The Biography. Smashing stuff) and bought the Sydney Morning Herald, a remaindered discount book (did I mention Spitfire: The Biography yet? Very exciting!), and a cheapie Pixar Cars colouring in book and some textas.

After ploughing through her babycino, and with that distinctive crescent-moon of chocolate dust from the paper cup’s rim turning her smile a bit Jokeresque, we opened the textas and looked at the first page of the colouring in book. It featured a grinning Lightning McQueen and Sally.

‘What colour should Lightning be?’

‘Um, red!’ She replied.

‘He is red, isn’t he? Here you go [proffering the uncapped red texta]: can you colour in his bonnet?’

‘No, you do it, daddy.’

‘Shall I do a tiny bit and then you do some?’

‘Yes.’

So I carefully coloured in a small portion of Lightning’s bonnet, keeping between the lines, and then made to hand the texta over to her.

‘Here you are. Your turn!’

She accepted the texta and drew one slow, desultory, meandering line through Lightning.

‘No. I don’t want to,’ she said, handing the texta back.

‘Why not?’

‘Because . . . I’m not a very good drawer.’ 

I was overwhelmed with sadness. To have an awareness about a yawning gulf in ability, to recognise a lack and articulate it . . . was just so profoundly mature and devastating that I was taken aback.

I’m really hoping that the experience of being around other kids next year in preschool will flatten out some of this perceived inability as she is surrounded by peers who inhabit the same general level.

Till then, no more ‘helping’.

Owing to the gobsmackingly revolting search terms being used on the internet which result in people looking at this blog—you know who you are, filth—I’ve changed the title.

I’ve been getting them for a while, but tonight I had one that made me puke in my mouth. Let’s hope the new title weeds out at least some of the now daily slew of sweaty-palmed slugs trying to find media online for something that should never even happen, let alone be filmed or photographed. I hope anyone who’s been typing some of the stuff that turns up in my ’search engine terms’ section of the WordPress dashboard (oh, yeah, I know what you typed to get here, and so does WordPress, and so will authorities) gets a knock on the door from law enforcement soon. Or at the very least give themselves a knock on the door of their own humanity and morality.

All of which makes me very sad, and very, very angry. I chose the original title because it was something that my daughter used to say to me which I thought was exceedingly cute, and I now, in all good conscience, have to ditch it because it’s drawing pusillanimous donkey smeg trying to find gratification in grievous exploitation and human suffering. Thanks a lot.

Getting into the car, I was attempting to strap Tiggy into her carseat for our trip home. Affecting an exaggeratedly comic ethnic Greek-Australian accent (affectionately observed from the speech of older, first generation migrant acquaintances and family friends), I said:

‘Alrigggghte, maaaaate! Into the caaaaar maaaaaaate!’ 

Tiggy wrinkled her nose at me.

‘Don’t speak Greek, Daddy.’

What a month and a bit it’s been! What an interruption in previously clockwork-regular blogging . . . really there’s just been too much happening recently to get to the computer and tell the world about it.

Suffice to say that in the last month Tiggy has developed an even more complex mode of self-expression (such as witty come-backs: ‘Don’t pick your nose on the train, sweetie.’ ‘What, not like you, Daddy?’ or self-doubt: ‘You colour it, darling.’ ‘No, I’m not a very good drawer.’), become exponentially more gregarious (approaching other children to play at the park, disappearing into the next aisle in the supermarket to say hello to random strangers) and ditched nappies (with a few minor accidents) to become a fully-fledged card-carrying member of the we-do-our-micturation-in-porcelain-bowls club.

I want to detail all of these things in separate posts, really, but here’s one just to say that we’re all still here.

And more pictures to come soon.

So on Sunday, after a long buildup, we took Tiggy to see her first film at the cinema.

She’s been watching television, sadly, since she was little (something which elicited much hand-wringing from Patrice and I from when she was in-utero onward . . . how much is too much? What should our policy be? At what age is an hour’s viewing appropriate? Which piece of research is definitive? What do we do about Patrice’s dad, for whom the television is a constant friend?): first, those useless and exploitative Baby Einstein DVDs* (never for very long, mind you. 15 minutes here and there), then a little bit of morning ABC TV (Playschool etc) and films on DVD. Not to mention videos of Pocoyo and other things on YouTube (my brother-in-law, Tiggy’s Nouno, suggested that I would become Google Inc’s darling if I managed to film Tiggy saying what she did to him one day: ‘I LOVE YouTube, Nouno!’ What can I say? Content-on-demand is king).

The most successful of these media has been films on DVD. I think Tiggy’s attraction to narrative through the medium of books, plus the participatory, interactive way that we watch films with her** has meant that an extended story, with characters, plot and development is her favourite, surpassing short series or activity-based children’s entertainment. She adores the younger end of the Studio Ghibli ouevre such as My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service (I tried her on Spirited Away, but the scene where Chihiro’s parents get turned into pigs, as well as the arachnid bellows-blower Kamaji, were a bit much. It is rated PG, after all), as well as virtually all of the Pixar films (including the short films).

So what was the film?

Wall-e, of course! As I said, some of her favourite films over the last year have been Pixar ones. At the end of last year and through the first few months of this year, it was Cars and Finding Nemo, and just recently, Toy Story and Toy Story 2 (curse you, Zurg).

We had been out for a Sunday afternoon, couldn’t-be-bothered-cooking, fish’n'chips dinner, and we were running a bit late. We had to zoom into the car, and race down to the local cinema to make it (dropping Patrice and Tiggy off in order that they could purchase the tickets while I found a park), but we got there. Tiggy was thrilled that two of her favourite things in the world, chocolate and ice-cream, can be combined into the one object and called a choc-top. So the WALL-E and EVE toys that she already had and wanted to bring with her got a little sticky.

Unfortunately, we’d seen a segment on Saturday Morning Disney the day before where the presenter, in a neatly synergetic advertorial spot (the TV show being produced by Disney, and Pixar being owned by the same), interviewed a to-scale WALL-E animatronic robot, so Tiggy’s expectations of what was going to happen at the cinema were a little skewed. I think she did expect to see a film, but she kept asking (right until the credits rolled and the lights went on again) when WALL-E was going to come out. She desperately wanted to meet him, I think . . .

But she loved being in the seats, she loved being between mummy and daddy, and she loved the customary Pixar short that precede their features (Presto—a film about a magician and his rabbit). There were other families with young children, and the atmosphere was good. She wasn’t frightened when the lights went out, and her eyes went wide at the stereo sound and the size of the moving picture.

Probably the most endearing thing about the whole experience was the running commentary that we got on what was happening. She was like a 1920s audience, not shy about voicing thoughts as the moving picture unfolded, shouting out to EVE ‘Don’t worry, EVE! WALL-E will be ok!’ and asking questions about characters, where they had gone, and what was happening next.

She loved MO, she squealed when WALL-E was collecting bits and pieces of rubbish and oddments for his neatly taxonomised collection, she cooed when WALL-E and EVE were holding hands. She didn’t like the security robots, or the nasty ship’s Autopilot. And she loved the human babies levitating in perfect rows on their grav-chairs, identical in red romper suits, raised en-masse on the spaceship Axiom, humanity’s life-raft.

For us, there were environmental, social and political themes galore. What happens to a species so greedy, so short-sighted that it fouls its own house? What happens to dignity, pride and purpose when people need not lift a finger to satiate any urge? Plus the deeply ironic awareness that the film, a gentle critique of mass-consumption, has mounds of merchandise.

I just hope that we don’t look back in fifty years and realise that the film was a blueprint, rather than a fantasy, and that it is not Tiggy’s future.

—

* Useless in that children of the age for which they are intended—babies—lack the means with which to process them (Ooo. Lights. Oooo. Sounds. Ooo. Unrelated and juxtaposed imagery, contextless and narrativally void), and exploitative in that they attempt to pander to parents’ natural desires that their children be given the best start possible in life: may as well start at zero to make your child smarter than anyone else’s! Baby Einstein must have seemed a crackerjack investment: Disney bought them in 2001, and sales of their DVDs have amassed a cool 500 mill so far. Thank God we didn’t pay for them. And thank God we didn’t subject her to any longer than 15 minutes at a time, either. The flash cards that accompany these DVDs, on the other hand (and which we did pay for), if not over-used, have proven useful, because they can be talking points . . . but then so can books. Just read your kids books, people.

** To allay my guilt at letting her watch more televisual media than I was comfortable with, I frequently sit down with her and provide a running commentary on what we are seeing. I do this both to interpret it for her—some of the concepts presented are too complex and need to be filtered for her level, as well as to make it more like a moving book (our reading style allows for lots of questions about what’s on each page, digressions, mini-plots, circling back, and alternative stories). Plus, I’ve long been an annoying heckler of advertisements and TV programmes (if I can deconstruct it on the fly, it won’t persuade me to buy), and I want her to realise that you don’t have to be passive in taking in media.

Tiggy has a neonate’s awareness of the existence of mutually incomprehensible languages on this planet. She knows that there are Greek words for some things, that some Pocoyo videos on YouTube are in Spanish, and that Only Yesterday is not dubbed into English, its audio track is only Japanese.

I assume that she has developed an understanding that ‘-ish’ suffixes on words could mean that they possibly relate to languages. That’s the only way to approach this exchange.

Yia Yia to Tiggy: ‘Are you ticklish?’

Tiggy to Yia Yia: ‘No! I am English!’

At the risk of sounding repetitive, bedtime can sure be a struggle.

Whether you’ve elected to try controlled crying/progressive waiting, camping out, co-sleeping or any other number of approaches, I think all of them are united ultimately by the experience of not working all the time . . . and not being straighforward. Controlled crying can work really effectively on some children, and it can fail dismally on others; or work for a period and then dwindle in efficacy. Co-sleeping can be comforting for the whole family, but it presents its own special, and at times herculean, challanges.

At first, Antigone slept in a swing-mounted cradle. She was never a particularly drowsy girl: when she was born, she cried briefly, and then maintained a fascinated moleish blinking for two and a half hours. She was often difficult to settle, and because I frequently did the first settling of the night, I resorted to nursing her in my arms, placing her down, and then rocking her cradle. I can sense the collective intake of breath: ‘Ahh. There. That’s where you went wrong. Assistance to sleep is going about it arse over tit.’ But on your own—or with the two of us alone, and in the gloaming early-morning hours, the room lit by the steadily dementing orange glow of a nightlight, it was easier than anything else at my disposal (and in some of our reading on developmental physiology and neurophysiology, rocking motions actually hasten inner ear calibration, governing balance, movement and bodily orientation. So at least it was helping somehow . . . !).

After Patrice and I felt like we were slowly going mad, we called in an early childhood nurse who prescribed the standard course of controlled crying (when Tiggy was about six months old, October 2006). Patrice and I steeled our wills and determined to try. It began on a Wednesday night, I think (or it could have been a Thursday. I am a bit hazy), and it lasted for 6 days and nights. Perhaps if we’d persevered longer, we would have cracked it rather than cracked ourselves, but Tiggy was sounding worse and worse as it progressed, hour by hour, day by day, horrific night by night: absolutely inconsolable. I could not stomach walking out of her room for the fiftieth time each night, seeing her little face wrenched up in a wet knot of abandonment, hearing the wracking sobs as she poured out her grief. It only got worse, not better, and this was meant to solve the sleep problems that we’d been experiencing, not add to them. (And once again, I can feel the mild opprobium: ‘Ahh. There’s your problem. They were too soft. Not willing to see it through.’)

As I said, this technique can work really well with some children: they don’t fight it very much, or quickly work out what’s required. Antigone was not one of those children. And I am not judging anyone for using whatever is at their disposal for their children’s happiness and their own sanity. Sleep is an instrument of torture, as governments and militaries well know. Parents know it best. If you utilised it and it worked for you, I applaud you! But it was an abject failure for us.

We ditched controlled crying, and cast about for other solutions. Then, after a short hire trial that impressed us, we decided to use a hammock: first an Amby, then a Happy Hangup.¹ They’re sold as comforting, encircling, enveloping places to sleep, and indeed, Antigone loved them. Once again, there was sleep assistance from me: both of these hammocks hung from springs which gave them vertical motion: the idea being that if the child moves in their sleep the hammock bounces slightly, comforting them to settle once again. I used their springs to settle her.

But these hammocks are only so big, and as she grew taller, her legs willowing from baby waddles to a little girl’s, she didn’t fit in them very well any more (particularly the Amby, which she loved, and from which we had wrung every last drop of use). Despite all our self-convinced fears and trepidation about making the move from a hammock to the ‘hard’ surface of a mattress, Antigone abruptly made the move to her cot one night. On the 4th of April this year, the spring on her Happy Hangup broke, so we made a big fuss of taking the baby slats off her cot and converting it into a toddler bed. It still sits, in a ’sidecar’ arrangement, alongside our king-sized futon, and it’s here and in her new ‘big girl’s bed’ in her room that she sleeps until this day.

Now it’s ‘nani-ing’. Tiggy gets tucked up and cosy, Daddy or Mummy or Yia Yia’s hand is on the mattress beside her, and gentle repetetive bouncing on the mattress ensues to the droning meditative hum of ‘nani, nani, nani’ (a Greek baby word for a sleep) until the breathing slows, the eyelids flutter, and the cheeks flush.

But we have struggles, contests and tussles over going to sleep. One more drink of water, the right song playing softly on the CD player, the right toy, Zurg down the side of the bed, one more cuddle. Usually, if she’s tired enough after some good park or soft play centre time during the day (and especially after swimming), you can make nought to nod in fifteen minutes or less (my daytime record is a minute thirty seconds, but boy was she tired then!). But if it’s a fighty night, then it can take up to an hour. Resettling during the night takes about ten minutes, unless she’s sick or otherwise perturbed. But because she’s still a night-time nursling (in the manner of many breastfed toddlers)—Elizabeth Pantley’s² phrase—she still wakes two to three times a night.

At least language helps. Thank goodness that Antigone is sufficiently communicative that we can articulate our desires and expectations and she can voice her emotions and frustrations.

‘I’m a little bit cross, because I don’t want to go to bed.’

I’m all set to do some more gentle modelling and roleplaying, using her good language, to show her that night-time is for sleeping. Just as soon as I get some more sleep.

- - -

¹ As for which of these hammocks is best? They’re both great. The Amby is very easy to collapse and highly portable, coming with its own carry bag, which made travelling a breeze: we could go on holidays or visits to my parents’ place with ease. Tiggy outgrew it faster than the Happy Hangup, but the Happy Hangup is definitely the more aesthetically pleasing of the two, with its smoothly curving wooden hanger and black frame.
² Author of some very heplful books on gentle sleep techniques. See http://www.pantley.com/elizabeth/

I know that every child has an incredible repertoire of creative language use, and that each and every parent is immensely proud of the things that their child produces, off the cuff, about their daily life. There is a constant torrent of words and expressions living with a small child, which like spiderwebs in bright sun and strong wind, dissipate in the memory. Only a selection survive to stick in the brain and become the stories that are told and retold; the ones that form the weft and warp of an adult’s narrative about their own childhood.

But I want to continue recording, in no particularly thorough way, some of the things that Tiggy says.

I really think that the evolution and use of language by children is one of the most singularly fascinating things in the universe. Language and communication is what makes us truly human (perhaps? Human beings have for too long ignored the communicative possibilities and strategies of animal-kind, downplaying their degree of comprehension of each other and other species, and thus their interior, mental life and empathetic qualities). Cicero said that language is what distinguishes us from beasts (maybe we just can’t, or won’t, learn their grammar!), and this process of ‘becoming-human’ by acquiring the chips in the language game is a process of endless delight. Whether you’re a Piagetian, thinking of language acquisition under a ‘tape-recorder’ model (where the child hears it and sucks it up, storing away everything that it’s heard to be reproduced later), or you’re a Chomskyian, where the brain is apriori primed for language and grammar just grows in the fertile soil of the brain, it’s very beguiling. 

I’ve written about her first consciously framed narrative, with an explicitly ’storytelling’ device.

But over the last week or two, more and still more constructions and conceits have appeared.

For instance, Tiggy’s had the first- and second-person possessive pronouns ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ down pat for some time, but the third person possessive eludes her. But she knows the ordinary third person. On getting inside my car last week, she exclaimed:

‘Daddy, we car is cold!’

On Monday, there was an epic, extended roleplay involving two of her dolls, Jade and Britannia, their car, and a desperately humane visit to the animal shelter to adopt a cat, a dog and a flying fox.

‘They driving to the animal shelter. They want to find a cat.’

Her understanding and articulation of time is embryonic at best. She enjoys echoing me when I mention times and periods of time: minutes, hours, days, weeks. And she’s only partially absorbed phrases which deal with time, reproducing my ‘a couple more minutes’ or a ‘couple more seconds’ (in the bath, sandpit, carseat etc) as:

‘Would I like to stay for a little bit more couples?’

She’s also experimenting with the musicality of the spoken word. The other night, she asked me to read a book.

‘Which book would you like to read, honey?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What about Ruby Roars? [a picture book about a Tasmanian Devil that works on her very own scary roar]

‘No, she’s too roary.’

‘What about Bobbie Dazzler?’ [another one about a kangaroo that is quite the acrobat but can't do the splits]

‘She’s too hoppy.’

‘Well what about Fat Pat?’ [in which a pudgy pudden of a puppy runs away from home]

‘No, he’s too waggy.’

She also joyously exercises her right to restate sentences in the negative:

‘That’s a funny puppy!’

‘No, it’s not a funny puppy!’

Fears and phobias have also recently made their appearance through language. The ludicrously styled villain from the Toy Story films, Zurg—who is nevertheless quite obviously prepossessing and magisterially evil to Tiggy—surfaces in her imagination around bedtime. The crack between her sidecar cot and our bed transforms into his point of entrance into our bedroom (again, framed in the negative . . . perhaps to negate the fear?):

‘Zurg is not popping up from there.’

Or, approaching her unlit bedroom at night at the top of the stairs, the villains of another film haunt her (Ice Age):

‘There are no sabre-tooth tigers in there.’

It’s an endlessly fascinating palimpsest of expressions.

Tiggy was quite exhausted by the time we left K and Ms P’s in the afternoon. Ms P and Tiggy had played really well with each other all morning and through lunch, and K was really accommodating by having me around even though she had a lot of work to do in getting cupcakes iced for collection. Tiggy and Ms P had exchanged hugs, milk bottles, Tiny Teddies, and me for chair-rides.

Now we were in the car, and her heavy lids were shuttering down in the warm, soporific hum of its interior. Her WALL-E and EVE toys were put to bed already, underneath the hem of her fairy skirt.

‘Daddy? Would I like something to eat?’ Her voice was langorous.

‘Sure, sweetpea. What would you like?’

‘Um . . . would I like a burger and chippies?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘From the Big Letter M?’

‘The Big, Yellow Letter M that has a clown statue outside?’

‘Yeah! I like that one.’