Walking off a cliff of verbage

Around a month ago L and I started to be concerned about the girl's language development. Mostly it was that she could only say a few words, used them erratically and pretty much with only one syllable. It wasn't any red flag or anything, but better to be safe than sorry. I mean, she could certainly understand us – that's been clear for quite some time. It's just she would not say anything to make her needs known. So we decide to take her to the monthly Talking Walk In to have her checked out by a professional.

The next session was 3 weeks away.

About a week after we made that decision she started adding a new word roughly every day. Plus she started being able to make new sounds like L and K. Not only did she have new words and sounds, but she started to be able to use them in useful way. Stuff like

• help
• please
• book – give me that book to read or read me that book
• cup – I want water
• shower I want to bathe
• back – take this away or I want to be someplace I was earlier or just give me that thing I had earlier
• sock / boot – as in,give me the... or take this ... off me
• panda – she carries around this tiny stuffed panda everywhere. She says this over and over if she can see it and she wants it. It came with a small book, and occasionally she calls the book panda too
• tissue – please wipe my nose
• bag
• bed
• cot
• bees – she has this bee mobile she's fond of
• oh – that's surprising
• teeth
• wet – Oops. I've missed.
• seat / sit – Usually with tapping next to her please sit next to me, though sometimes it's I want to sit there.
• talk – Oooh Skype. I want to talk.
• watch – Is that Youtube/iPlayer? Can I see?
• walk – I want to go outside
• up – lift me up, she also says this when walking up the stairs
• down – She repeats this when walking down stairs
• dark – I notice you just turned out the lights
• light – please hand me / turn on the light
• bucket – she has a toy pail she likes to play with
• and occasionally she says what sounds like bog when she needs the loo.

On top of that, hello, water, dog are now quite distinct. She even has fun repeating duck and dog over and over making sure the words are sufficiently different. Same thing with keys and cheese, though less often (she really likes cheese, but she also really likes playing with keys – I'm not sure which she likes more)
She can say cat, but recently has tended not to in favour a sad, plaintive mewing noise she obviously picked up from her time spent with friends' cats.

Anyway, back to the point of this post… Over that three week period she started saying more and more. To the point that when she babbles, we can catch some sense in there as often as not. Two days before we were due to take her in, on a whim I decided to recite the alphabet to her:

A — ay
B — beeeeee
C — ceee
D — dee
E — əə
F — eh
G — Jee
H — ay
…and so on, for the full alphabet. We got to the end and she'd managed all but a few letters. L looked at me and asked Do we really need to take her to be checked out?
At which point we decided that if she wasn't on track, she was coming along nicely. It's weird how it seems to have exploded from almost nothing to almost practical in such a short period of time. Brains are fascinating.

Random chatting fathers

The other day I was taking the train home with the girl. She didn't want to be in the sling much that day, so she did most of her own walking and, on the train, she sat in her own seat, opposite me. Despite, or because, it being the two of us in a pair of bench seats for 5, no one sat in the other 3 seats, even though it was rush hour.

At the first stop, a man carrying an 18 month old boy in a sling got on the train, and immediately decided that this would be a good place to sit. We quickly got to talking, mostly because the girl started saying Bæ bæ bæ over and over as soon as she saw the baby in his arms.

It was nice finding a kindred spirit to share the ride home. He'd spent his afternoon with his son at the Museum of Childhood. I'd spent the afternoon with the girl at the Museum of London. He extracted his lad from his sling and plunked him down next to the girl. Despite being practically the same age (she's 19 months old), there was a marked difference between them. He was bigger than her, but quite shy. She was quite interested and babbling to him, with the occasional pointing or poking. He sat there looking a bit tired and droopey eyed barely registering her, while we exchanged stories about what each museum does well and what other good places we've taken our kids lately.

I'd never done that before – meeting a fellow father and just gabbing away about fun things to do with children. I mean, I do that with friends all the time, but it's the total stranger part that's new to me. Usually with complete strangers it's What a cute baby or other suchness about the child. I suppose what I liked about this is it was about parenting. Not how the baby looks or what they do, but here's some fun things you can do while being a part of their life.

Earlier that day, in the museum, I spent the bulk of my time just following the girl around as she walked from exhibit to exhibit, looking under the tables, walking circles around models in glass cases, taking guides and handing them to bemused staff and pointing to a taxidermied rabbit and saying Cat!

One of my favourite parts was in the 18^th century section where they have artefacts about half a foot under the floor covered clear glass, so you can look down and see various bits and pieces of daily life from back then. It's sturdy glass, so you can walk over it too.

So I did. I, in clear view of the girl, walked on this glass, at a slow pace so she'd see what I was doing, but without breaking my stride. I always walk on glass bridges whenever I can, because it feels so wrong and so mundane at the same time. The girl followed, but with very hesitant steps. The first step onto the glass was in complete disbelief that it was possible to do this. Each subsequent step clearly said It feels solid, but all my instincts say that can't be. She never quite got comfortable walking on the glass, but at least she started getting use to the fact that it was evidently possible to do so. Every step was measured and slow, and stepping back onto opaque land was as hesitant as stepping onto the glass had been.

I consider this one of my jobs as parent. To dash her world view. To show her how her instincts can be plain wrong. I'm kind of hoping it will just give her a better class of instincts when she's older.

All tomorrow's parties

It seems to be getting harder and harder to be sociable with a child. Going out with the wife and without the child is expensive and requires lots of advance planning. I can go out by myself, which is okay, but I married L because I enjoy doing stuff with her. It's not as fun going to clubs or gigs without her. We could have people over, but that seems to be less and less an option.

If I try having a party or some other event, I'm more and more finding people won't come. Of all the various events I've organised over the years, the number of people who say they're going to come has dropped dramatically. However that's not dropped nearly as dramatically as the number of people who say they'll come and actually do show.

I've organised a lot of social events over the years. I've gotten used to people saying I might be able to make it, but x… and that meaning there's around 20-40% chance of them coming – depending on what x is. But if someone says I'll be there then they're almost certainly going to be there. I got the the point that I could guess quite accurately the number of people who'd actually show.

I've noticed a trend of of increasing flakiness with friends over the past few years – where people who said they'd come just don't show up, and saying I might come is actually shorthand for Thanks for inviting me. That was before the girl was born. Since she's been here, the flakiness of my non-childed friends as gone up drastically. Pretty much everything I've tried to arrange lately has fallen apart to some degree.

For my birthday last week, I'd tried to organise a nice little outing plus lunch. Despite a number of people saying they'd come, not a single one of my friends did. So I spent the birthday with the girl and her cousins from out of town. While a nice afternoon was had by all, that's not the point. This is just the extreme case of a trend I've seen amplified since the girl was born. yes, I'll come has more and more meant … unless something else comes up, or I decide to sleep in, or the weather is bad… I've stopped having parties at the house, since I got annoyed of buying and making food and drinks for the people who said they'd come, only to have less than a quarter of them actually show.

It used to be as much one in ten would or so would drop out last minute to due illness or some other emergency. And usually they'd mention being on call or getting sick days in advance. I'm getting far more last minute no-warning excuses now. They may be true – perhaps we're all getting older and more fragile. Or maybe they just like the credible sound of these excuses. Or maybe in this age of social media and mobile phones people don't really plan things and just decide last minute based on their mood when they go online and see they have something to do.

While I call out specifically non-childed friends above, it's not that childed friends are immune to dropping out. In fact it's the opposite – it's fairly common for people with kids to drop out last minute, and I expect that. The problem is amplified at children's parties. The number of people who say they're going to show up for a party is several times the number of people who do show. To the point where it's pretty common for no one at all to show, or sometimes only one or two guests come.

I know I've been guilty of this – children get sick, and you don't want to bring a nasty disease and turn a party into a den of germs. The girl was at risk of chicken pox last year (turns out she did have the pox) and we skipped a first birthday party I'd committed to going to. I felt horrible about it, but I did have a good reason. Just the fact that everyone else also pulled out for various reasons makes me feel guilty.

It's pretty disappointing to be in this dilemma. When the girl was very young it was trivial to take her to pubs and restaurants – she'd sleep or quietly sit through. Now she spends the time eating. She's well behaved, but needs enough attention that I find at the end of the night all I can remember is saying a few words to the person sitting next to me and maybe vaguely what I ate. That's not quite true – I can remember what she ate, what she threw on the floor, what she didn't like, which cutlery she used, how much she drank and the number of times I took her too the loo. I can do all that at home.

So, is it even possible to have a family and still have any sort of social life? Am I stuck with Facebook and the like being my only lifeline to my childless friends? Do I only get to hang out with other people with kids of the same age? I don't mind that last bit since we've plenty of friends with kids under 4. But I wouldn't be friends with everyone else if I didn't want to see them.