don't know nothin' about nothin'
During the pregnancy, I learned a few things about expecting mothers. For example:
- They don’t like to be told to hurry.
- It’s called a dress, not a “tarp.”
- Only Mama can reference the Simpsons’ pryin’ bar joke.
Fatherhood comes with its own set of lessons. Even in the first six days, your reporter has managed to pick up on a few things. For instance:
Babies don’t know anything. Anything.
They don’t know that your smile means everything is groovy - so they just don’t believe your silly, cooed assurances. They don’t know that milk doesn’t flow from every surface on the planet - so they get really pissed when they fail to extract it from your shoulder, the cuff of their nightgowns, their own hands, or even the air that surrounds us all.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about babies is that they don’t cry much. Really. I know you’re thinking the diaper fumes must have gone to my head, but I’m serious. They don’t cry much at all.
What they do is talk. All the time. It just so happens that the only word they know is “Aaaaa,” along with a couple of its conjugates, “Laaaa” and “Naaaa.”
Baby talk seems to be something of a tonal language. If you listen carefully, you can pick up a number of nuances. Depending on how it’s enunciated, “Aaaaa” can mean any of the following:
- “Um, guys? You moved three feet outside my field of vision. Do you still exist? Guys? Guys?”
- “I’m workin’ on a doody. This is gonna be a good one.”
- “I don’t care if I just filled my belly to the puking point. I said I wanted seconds.”
- “I didn’t say you could change my diaper yet. It’s cold in here. You put my nightie back on right now. Nowwwwwwwww!“
Learning works both ways: babies understand parent talk, too. A few weeks ago, I listened to a really interesting radio show that demonstrated how parents across languages and cultures sing nearly the same song to their children. I caught myself doing it, too. Not because I’d heard the parents on the show, and not because I was getting all mushy over baby (well, maybe a little), but because it works.
We talk to Robin all the time, and there are definitely tones she responds to better. Through something like natural selection, the ineffective sounds fade into disuse, and the effective ones stick around. I’ve reverse-engineered the song (not too difficult, just a major triad), and it goes a little something like this:
The words don’t matter, so you can sing nearly anything to that tune. “It’s a baaaaay-beeeeee” seems to be a favorite, but “Girly-girrrrrrrl” works as well. Next, I’ll try a few computer programming terms. Get her hooked on “Ruby languaaaaaage” early, and maybe we can save her from the hell of coding to Windows’s nightmare C++ interface. (Assuming the forces of good haven’t removed Windows from the planet altogether by the time she’s reached programming age.)
Anyway—not only is Robin a good interpreter of Mom-and-Dad-speak, she’s also a good kid. She’s been peacefully asleep for the whole time I’ve been writing this. That photo up there was taken just a few minutes ago.
Aaaaaaaand, now she’s awake. Gotta go.