Yesterday, you turned 14 months old. Before we had you, I never realized how much of a difference one month can make in the life a person your size. I used to think that people who said ages in months were a little snobbish, but I now I realize that so much happens between one year and 18 months.

For instance, you seem to think that once you have demonstrated sufficient mastery of a skill, you no longer have any need to perform said skill again. Say for instance kisses and waving bye-bye. A month ago, you would do both, almost on command. And now: nothing. No kisses. No waves.

It almost feels like you dismiss our requests with a miniature eye-roll and a sigh that seems to say, honestly guys, that was so last month. Get with the times, will you? Since when did an under-two-year-old come with the attitude of a teenager?

(And since this file-and-forget behavior dominates almost all of your actions, why do still play in the potted plant dirt? Trust me, you have it down.)

Your inquisitiveness is growing faster than you can explore. If either your mother or I have any sort of item that you catch sight of, you would like to hold it and have it, please. Only, you don’t say please. No, you reach your tiny hand up, pull on our legs, and whimper until you get what you want. Sometimes, if it is very serious, you will squeal and stomp your little feet on the ground to show your displeasure at being denied such a simple request as give me that.

I can’t wait to see what a full blown tantrum looks like.

You know your way around the house very well and you also know when we head upstairs without you. Yesterday, you were in the kitchen and I walked by to go upstairs with a load of clothes from the dryer. I paused halfway up and could hear the tiny stomping of your footsteps coming around the corner on your way to follow me up.

This insistence on being where we are is charming, but you also tend to get underfoot and in the way. You like to help unload the dishwasher regardless if the dishes are clean or dirty, especially the silverware. We do our best to steer you more toward the spoon and rubber spatulas and away from the forks and paring knives.

You also are a more than willing participant in sorting clothes. While I prefer to sort into whites, colors, and darks, you trend more toward in the basket and out of the basket. I know you’re new at doing laundry, but if I’m really honest about it, you’re a little indecisive. You will take one item out, study it, put it on the floor, pick it back up and decide it should really go in the basket after all.

One of your latest favorite pastimes is walking around with your purse on your shoulder. Or, really, anything that you can drape over your shoulder. You walk around with your arm straight up in the air to keep the strap up and march around the house.

In case you haven’t picked up on the trend, you love to pick things up and carry/drag them around with you. And that’s fine. We like it when you play with your toys and even when you play with things that aren’t your toys. But maybe we could work on putting things back in some semblance of order. I know that you aren’t up late at night, but our house is actually getting to be a fairly dangerous place to walk around in the dark.

The days are getting shorter. The sun is down by the time you go to bed and it’s still dark when we roust you in the morning. We try to get you to sleep early, but there is just so much to do with you, like go on walks and bike rides and explore the yard. The mornings when we are working come far to soon for all our liking; just last week, I could have sworn you mumbled, Five more minutes, as I came into your room to get you dressed.

Speaking of speaking, you are doing very little of that. You still have no real words that you use in any sort of context. And that’s fine. You talk a lot, and when I say talking, I mean use many different sounds and inflections and cadences. You talk to us, you talk to your toys, and you talk to yourself. You are very earnest in your efforts to communicate. I often wonder if we still sound as strange to you as you do to us most of the time. Perhaps you already have your own language all developed and you’re just waiting for us to catch on so we can hold a decent conversation.

I know this is a recurring theme, but you are growing up so fast. Your hair is long enough to put into pigtails. You like to feed yourself with your spoon and you don’t need us to cut up all of your food anymore. (You could probably do with more chewing and less swallowing whole.)

We brush your teeth every night after that bath and this is now one of your favorite parts of the bedtime routine. You help put your clothes on in the morning and take them off at night. Sometimes, it feels like at the rate you’re growing, we’ll be handing you the keys to the car by Christmas.

Just remember Brooklynn, no matter how big and mature you get, you’ll still be our little girl. (And give your mom a kiss once a while. She’d really like that.)

Love,
Dad

TV. Screen Time. Digital Media Consumption. Cell Phones. Twitter. Heck, personal websites.

Namely, how much technology is enough technology, and how much screen time is too much screen time for a child.

Everything I’ve ever read on the subject of screen time seems to refer back to some American Association of Pediatrics (and no, I have never looked up the exact study or recommendation that is all too often referenced). It states that for kids under 2, screen time should be limited to a minimum.

Period.

No maximum of XXX hours per day or week, no mention of eating dinner in an Applebee’s and having 13 TVs playing sports going. No mention of the 100-inch screen in your home theater being any worse than the 4” screen on your iPhone, even if they both play same the cartoons.

I take that to mean that the AAP feels that no amount of screen time is appropriate. That time should be spent nurturing your child with enriching activities, like playing with old school wooden blocks and reading Mother Goose nursery rhymes and possible having a discussion on the electromagnetic properties of inert gases and why ionization of said gases and subsequent photon emission is so vital in the working of compact florescent lightbulbs. (Not that I would actually talk about that last one with a one year old. That would be ludicrous.)

Well, I have news for the AAP. We have a TV in our house and we even have it on from time to time. Sometimes Brooklynn is around. We don’t watch entire half-hour shows with her, nor do we ever let the TV act as a pseudo-babysitter, as in, hey look at the flashing colorful screen!

She likes football (bright colors?) and short bits of cartoons with songs, but mostly, her attention span doesn’t last longer than a few minutes at any one time and she wanders off to do something else. We don’t encourage her to sit and watch anything and we do all of our movie watching when she is asleep.

We don’t have cable or satellite television, and considering we watch maybe around 5 hours of live TV each week, it doesn’t seem like we are missing much. We do have an internet connection and both Rhiannon and I spend a fair amount of time in front a computer screen.

Brooklynn loves our computers. I showed her a few music videos on YouTube a few days ago, and she watched and danced her little head-bopping dance along with them. Is this screen time? I would say yes. But really, she just loves our computers because she wants to bang on the keyboards. As in, BANG, how long until I permanently damage your computer, Dad?

I guess we follow the AAP guidelines more out of lack of opportunity than any real conscious effort. If we notice Brooklynn zoning out in front of the TV, that means it’s time to turn it off and do something else. And if we leave her in front of computer for too long, something bad will happen to that computer.

Good parenting by default. Although, if there were still Saturday morning cartoons like when I was growing up, I might be right there watching them with her.

For us, the actual feeding is easy. It just takes the following 10 simple steps:

1. Make food. It really doesn’t matter what. The baby will eat anything put in front of her.
2. Hurry to cut up food because the baby in the high-chair is HUNGRY!
3. Leave bigger pieces of food, because a) screaming baby and b) she has teeth, now, right? Then she can chew a little bit.
4. Put food in front of baby.
5. Watch baby shove handfuls of food into mouth and attempt to swallow without any chewing.
6. Place hand in front of baby’s mouth and say “Spit it out!” in an authoritative voice. Catch slimy, spit-covered food in hand.
7. Break food into smaller chunks.
8. Attempt to eat your own food while being stared at by a small person who wants to eat from your plate. (See number 2, soooo hungry. And really guys, give me a bite, pleeeeaaaase.)
9. Give baby some of your food. Realize that her plate is empty. She really didn’t chew at all, huh?
10. Wipe down baby, chair, table, floor, walls, etc.

Really, nothing to it. Step six comes in especially handy when she tries to eat rocks from the gutter in front of the house.

So, given the fact that Brooklynn will in fact eat just about anything we put on her plate (turkey, chicken, beef, salmon, tilapia, peas, carrots, corn, zucchini, squash, bell peppers, asparagus, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, waffles, pancakes, crackers, peaches, grapes, pineapple, ketchup, yogurt, etc.), we really do work on putting decent things in front of her.

Yes, she has the occasional cookie at the grocery store or a little ice cream from time to time, but she has never had pop or juice, and we try to stay away from processed foods as much as possible.

She loves her some Sponge Bob macaroni and cheese from a box, and we think it’s because she can pick up the noodles easier than the standard mac and cheese made with elbow macaroni. But other than that, we do attempt to use food that does not come from a cardboard container and list several unintelligible ingredients where possible.

It isn’t easy. This weekend, we were making some homemade Cold-Stone like ice cream creations and needed to pick up caramel. I’ve made my own caramel. I love caramel. So, when presented the choice between caramel “flavored” topping and what looked like true caramel goodness in a glass jar no less, which do you think I picked?

I looked at the back of the “flavored” el-cheapo stuff (which I have had and think is actually quite tasty). Ingredients: High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, etc. Now, the back of the glass jar, real caramel version. Ingredients: Corn Syrup, High-Fructose Corn syrup, etc.

See. The real stuff is obviously so much better, be cause there’s more plain corn syrup than the high-fructose variety. Obviously.

Now, the last time I made caramel sauce, I’m confident the recipe didn’t call for corn syrup of any kind, or any artificial flavors or colors or preservatives. Homemade caramel ingredients: Sugar, Butter, Heavy Cream.

Period. Nothing else. Of course, it only has a refrigerated shelf life of around two weeks, but let’s all be honest here. I have never had a batch of homemade caramel last anywhere close to two weeks to actually test that out. So we got the cheap stuff that I knew tasted good, because I wanted some ice-cream (actually frozen yogurt) and I wasn’t about to take the time to make it myself.

When I was growing up, sugar was bad for you because it would rot your teeth, or at least that’s what we were told every Halloween. Now, with preservatives and corn-this and soy-that, sugar is healthy. There are “throwback” versions of pop, made with real sugar, and they advertise it like it’s great. Our pop has real sugar, not fake sweeteners, so it’s good for you too!

Between hormone enhanced beef, mercury laden farm-raised fish, and ground up soy products leading to surplus of estrogen production fears, it’s hard to know what to feed your kids. Sometimes, I think eating out at restaurants is the easier option, not because the food is any less processed or healthier, but because there are no ingredient labels on the bottom of the plates.

Ignorance really might be bliss.

In this economy, the price of food seems to come up on the evening news and morning talk shows every other week, and there always seems to be a segment highlighting someone who clips coupons and buys only sale items and seems to feed a family of 15 for $2 a day. And when you look at their cart as they go through the checkout, it’s stacks of boxes and cans and bottles and very little fresh meat, fruit, or veggies.

Manufacturers don’t make coupons for vegetables, maybe because there’s nothing to manufacture. Same with fruit. And if I buy a steak or roasting chicken, I’m pretty sure there aren’t too many artificially processed ingredients there.

Don’t get me wrong and think I’m naïve. Farming and ranching is big business. As much as we’d all like to imagine our cows were in the pasture last week eating fresh grass, that isn’t the case. Chickens aren’t roaming a barnyard only to scatter when the farmer idles through on his tractor. Feedlots. Cramped conditions. We just feign ignorance and move on.

So, we shop on the outside of the store as much as possible, and most of the time, it means we don’t have a lot of food that lasts more than a week in the fridge. Some of it is frozen, once in a while some of it gets moldy and we through it away. We buy some organic and make a lot of food at home. We spend more than we could scrape buy on and less that we would if we ate out more and feel fortunate that, overall, money is not a factor in what we choose to eat.

I read a statistic that the average one year old needs 1300 calories per day. Considering adults should be somewhere around 2000 calories, that’s a lot of food for a person who is hovering right around 25 pounds. When you look at the nutrition facts on raw veggies and fruit, it takes a lot of food to get to 1300. I have no idea if we’re doing the best thing for Brooklynn. I don’t know if I do the best thing for myself most of the time.

I like to think we’re doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. And I know that some real caramel and ice cream from time to time is never a bad thing.

On a typical morning, I go in to her room and get her dressed for the day. I did it almost every day of the school year last year and the first three days this week. I guess she’s pretty used to having me to interact with, at least when the sun is just coming up.

This morning, I was running a little late, so when Brooklynn woke up, Rhiannon was more ready to get her than I was. Through the monitor, I heard her mention to Brooklynn that having Mom get her ready was a change. Rhiannon stopped by our bedroom before heading downstairs with the baby, and Brooklynn started to cry and reach out for me. I took her, said good morning, and tried to hand her back.

She cried and held on to me. This is the typical response that Rhiannon got for most of the summer when I would come home, except that this time, the tables were reversed.

Rhiannon looked at me and asked how it felt to be the more loved parent for the moment.

I replied that it was nice but a little inconvenient, especially seeing as how I was trying to finish getting dressed and having to hold a clinging baby at the same time.

She looked at me and said, “Exactly.” And then she walked away.

Welcome to parenthood.