In which we make fabulous weird babies

So, you'd think we'd have learned from our experience with Very Young Jolly that the solution to "my baby is pestering me about wanting to drink what's in my mug" is never "just let the baby try a sip and let the baby realize it is bitter and gross so then I can drink my black coffee/tea in peace."

But no, now we have TWO children who instantaneously fell in love with the taste of black coffee, and also of tea. (I just didn't think it was possible for it to happen again, but it did.) Rip is less communicative with the "more" sign than his big brother was, but the gleeful hurling himself towards the cup with greedy shrieks is rather unmistakable. Well, maybe we can just start brewing a whole pot of decaf.

This leads to conversations where the dentist praises my cleaning of Jolly's teeth and points out that he has some stains on the bottom that are just cosmetic in nature. "Iron supplements?" she guesses. "Nooooo," I say, and admit, "Probably the coffee," and then hastily clarify, "DECAF coffee." Happily, the very first cleaning with the polishing machine in the big-boy dentist chair took care of those stains.

Ways in which Rip and Jolly are different: Rip is currently trying to erect a food pyramid that is at least twice the size of Jolly's. Also, vegetables are only a tiny fraction of Rip's idea of an ideal day, but they are pretty much what Jolly wants to fill his much more normally-sized pyramid with. He eats more than a lot of kids, actually, but he just likes to eat excruciatingly healthy and low-calorie-dense foods. "I don't want any quesadilla. Can I have more chard stems please?" and "I don't want any cake. Can I have another apple?"

Frontloading the less-preferred food at the beginning of the meal when the diner is most hungry is a good idea, but it's hard when you want to frontload one kid with vegetables and fruit so he will eat something besides refined carbs and you want to frontload the other kid with refined carbs so he will eat something besides vegetables and fruits and thereby take in some calories. We just emphasize the importance of balance in the diet, which I think is all we can do.

A few weeks ago, I made pesto with the rather wee batch of basil that came in our farmshare. I hadn't really paid attention to the scant amount of basil so I just hurled most of an entire head of garlic into the food processor, only to realize after blending that there was not nearly as much basil and other stuff to counterbalance the garlic. Alas, the march of entropy being what it is, it was not possible to unblend and remove the garlic, and we didn't have more other ingredients to add in, so it was very overly intense pesto, and I say that as someone who really likes a lot of garlic. Given that the pesto made me sort of catch my breath and wince a little, I thought it might be wise to offer Rip plain noodles drizzled in olive oil instead. Rip received said offering, put one noodle in his mouth, spat it out, and then with his signature move (a lightening fast windshield-wiper action of the sort that makes me understand why some people have hideous enormous highchairs with trays that have sides) jettisons the pasta onto the floor. Rejected. We pick up, offer it again, point out that it is a noodle, albeit a wholewheaty one, and he LOVES noodles. Disdainfully throwing overboard again is followed by whining pathetic starving baby sounds at what's on Ephiny's plate. Ephiny says, "These are noodles too, just like yours! You have everything on my plate!" and tries a third time. Rip whines, hurls food onto floor/wall/heater. Fine. Ephiny gives him a serving of pesto-smeared noodles. Rip stuffs pesto noodles into mouth, making happy-eating sounds. We wait for the howls of baby-mouth-burning once the garlic hits, but they never come. Rip puts away a rather huge quantity of pesto noodles. Rip is even enticed into eating vegetables once they have had a rather impressive amount of pesto smeared onto them. Weird, no?

This exact same scene played itself out with salsa tonight. Would Rip like a gouda quesadilla with black beans on the side? NO, emphatically no. The heater and wall would like those things. Rip would like Ephiny's more agressively crunchy and thus harder to eat assembly of the exact same ingredients, only with salsa smeared over. It turns out that the salsa was the magic ingredient. It rendered the previously unacceptable quesadilla delicious, as well as the black beans, and it also was consumed from a spoon... where spoon feeding is decidedly "out" these days. Granted, it was a mild salsa, but still. I have visions of Rip being a teenager who will go out to the spare fridge we will have to have in the garage and eating huge quantities of Costco-purchased stereotypical teenager food which he smothers in Sriracha sauce.

I would like to note that if Rip is going to be a food critic, he's going to have to stop lobbing food off the table when he finds it unacceptably enticing. He may also need to work on his vocabulary.

And, some observations for posterity: right now my boys are doing a lot of pretend play. Jolly likes to be a pirate or a viking sailing the sofa, and Rip is usually a (butt-scooting) shark on the floor in these games. Appropriately, bathtime is a favorite time for both - it's finally less precarious now that they both have learned how to sit up unassisted and have the good sense to not stick their heads into the water or tackle each other (well, Jolly has). Rip has to be physically restrained from hurling himself into the tub ahead of schedule. The worst moment of Rip's day is the removal from the bath, which is karma coming back to me because I think this is a regard in which my poor parents suffered greatly with me.

Also, after having read about the 30 million word gap between high and low socioeconomic status kids and how much they are talked to... I would propose hiring out Jolly to other families to solve that problem singlehandedly in a very short span of time, but I enjoy his company too much. Our neighbor, seeing us out for a walk, commented, "He really never stops talking, does he?" and the answer is no, not really. I bet it's doing awesome things for Rip's brain development to spend his days surrounded by two people who like to narrate everything they are doing*. And indeed, Jolly seems dedicated to the cause, saying he doesn't want to preschool because he "want[s] to stay home with you and pick out socks for Next Baby insteeeead."

(Because if Jolly were to leave for three hours, we'd clearly all descend into sockless anarchy. It's worth noting that Next Baby not yet en route, he's just planning ahead.)

I've started running again, tailbone injury be damned (it's been a year since Rip's birth, seriously!), and Jolly alternates shouting "Faster, Mummy, FAAAASTER! RUN RUN RUN!" with incessant questions about "whyyyy? but whyyyy?" which I suppose mean that I need to really follow that rule about exercising to an intensity where you can barely keep up a conversation. I'm now pushing over 100 lbs of kid and stroller up and down the hills of our neighborhood, so it's pretty slow going, but it does feel good to be lacing up the running shoes again. Jolly loves bossing us about in terms of direction and speed and having a steady stream of things to ask why questions about, and Rip loves looking at new things and not having to move himself around to do so. Works well for all of us!

Lastly, Jolly was making a pomander with me the other day and sticking cloves haphazardly into the orange by himself. Then, he'd stop to tell me I had to do one, too. When I complied, he smiled at me and cheerily piped "Goooood joooob!" in a tone and inflection that totally made me feel like I was looking in a mirror. It was uncanny.

I guess the theme of this post is that although I feel like personality is really innate (we totally had Rip pinned correctly within days of his delivery with "very happy and content, lots of eating, lots of sleeping, punctuated by brief but intense periods of rage"), I think there's a really special joy in watching a child take on your traits by nurture rather than nature. And I am in the 4% of parents who says "thank you" when getting a sample at Costco, so apparently I could be doing a worse job of it. It's certainly great fun, at any rate.

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* Though it seems to confuse Rip the baby when Jolly and I read Rup3rt Bear annuals, which we are currently spending many hours of each day doing, because he hears his name and then whips his head around from whereever he is and can't figure out why we're talking about him.