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by Brian PJ Cronin, photo by Kristen Cronin
I did not complain about winter this year because at least we had a winter this year. Last year winter was a three day stretch in late October followed by four and a half months of grey skies, brown grass, 40 degree days and a river that never froze. It was supposed to be Cooper’s first winter. Instead it was just dark and windy. All of his snow clothes went up to the attic in April with the tags still on them.
This year winter was winter. It snowed on Christmas Eve. It snowed on Kristen’s birthday in March. It snowed and snowed and snowed. Instead of putting winter gear away in the attic, we went up to the attic and pulled out my Flexible Flyer sled from the 1970’s and found that it, despite being somewhat of a rickety death trap, still has a few years left in it. Twenty one months old, and Cooper finally had a winter.
Guess what? Turns out the kid is crazy about winter. Emphasis on the word “crazy.” He ate about a pound of snow a day. Kristen came up with the idea of filling a casserole dish with snow for him to play with indoors. Instead I watched in awe as he ate the whole thing with all the deliberate plotting and easy pacing of an Elks Club Treasurer at a pie eating contest.
We tried to make sure that, no matter how cold it was, Cooper always spent part of the day outdoors. This led to a lot of Saturday mornings in which Cooper and I were the only ones at the frigid, barren playground as he happily ran around hunting for ice and snow. He has an uncanny ability to, even on the driest days, find a freezing puddle of icy water somewhere that he can repeatedly shove his hands into. This is a problem because he refuses to put on gloves. I tried putting them on him once and he screamed so loud I almost got arrested. We attempted to compromise with fingerless gloves, but let’s be honest with ourselves: fingerless gloves are useless. It’s the fingers that get cold in the winter. You never hear anyone complaining that their palms are cold.
Invariably, after about twenty minutes of barehanded snow slapping and ice punching, Cooper would run up to me crying and screaming. He would hold out his pink, swollen hands and say “OW OW OW!” Often, he would still be holding snow. “Your hands hurt because of the snow,” I’d say. “If you put the snow down, your hands won’t hurt anymore.” Then I would nod my head in a sagely dad-ish sort of way and wait for my progeny to absorb this latest nugget of hard earned wisdom. Cold things are cold! I have so much to pass on to the next generation.
Have you ever tried to reason with a toddler? It doesn’t work. Toddlers think that cats want to have their tail pulled and that “hang glider” is an acceptable career choice. Instead of putting the snow down, Cooper stared at me like I was an idiot. “Put the snow down?” his expression seemed to say. “But then I won’t be holding snow. So make it so that I can hold the snow and not get cold but I refuse to wear gloves or a hat and quite frankly you’re lucky I let you even put this coat on me.”
It was always at this point that the wisdom of the ages would fail me. Cooper was miserable but having the time of his life and wanted it to stop and go on forever. Do I take the snow away, making him upset? Do I take him home, making him upset? Do I let him keep splashing in ice cold puddles with his bare hands, making him upset? Do I just stand there with a stupid look on my face, making him upset? Every week we run into this problem and every week I never have an answer.
So I will not complain about winter, but I am glad to see it go. I am in desperate need of long walks after dinner wearing a light jacket and my old Mets cap. I am ready for our herb garden to flourish once again so that I can stop spending five dollars a week on sickly damp chives and crumbling rosemary. And I no longer want to stand helplessly by as Cooper continues crying and screaming and laughing with tears running down his frostbite bloomed cheeks, jamming tiny pink fingers into snowbank after snowbank after snowbank, unable to ever get enough.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine and Instagram.com/kristencronin.
Tags: Beacon, Cooper, Cronin, March, winter
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photograph by Kristen Cronin
Is it ok to call 911 to say “thank you?”
I’m guessing it’s not, that it’s one of those things they frown upon because it ties up the line. It’s just that the dispatcher I got when I called was so calm and reassuring that his serenity rubbed off on me a little, even though the reason I was calling was because our 20-month-old son, Cooper, was having a violent and terrifying seizure. The dispatcher was extraordinarily helpful by explaining that it sounded like a febrile seizure, which is fairly common amongst toddlers. That as long as he was making sounds, he was still breathing, even though his mouth was filling with foam. That even though it seemed like it was taking a long time for the ambulance to get to us, it was only because time was slowing down for me at that moment and we had actually only been on the phone for 90 seconds. So I’m wondering how I can call 911 back, get that same guy on the phone, and say thank you.
And while we’re at it, how can I find out the names of the firefighters, paramedics, EMTs and police officers who showed up? Is it weird to want to thank them for being so calm and helpful and courteous, and to apologize that the house was such a mess and that they all had to run up that very narrow staircase with all their equipment and maneuver through two sets of baby gates and I didn’t even offer them coffee? Oh god, I should have offered them coffee, I made a fresh pot about two minutes before Cooper’s seizure started. And it was nice how, in the ambulance over to the hospital, they gave Cooper a teddy bear that they happened to have in the back, so that he wouldn’t be so scared. Do they need the bear back? Was it a loaner bear? I’m kind of hoping he gets to keep it, because he’s become quite attached to it.
Is it strange to want to thank a band I’ve never met? I’m sure the band Amor de Dias isn’t reading this, but I happened to have one of their albums in the car, and listening to those softly beguiling bilingual songs about rivers and alleyways really helped me out on the drive over, because it was nice to briefly think about the influence of Belgian surrealism on pop music, and the feeling of psychogeographical dislocation that comes on the outskirts of suburbia, as opposed to the fact that I was driving 20 miles over the speed limit while following an ambulance that had my son inside.
It’s probably stupid to want to get in touch with the people who make those Baby Einstein videos and say thank you, right? I know that I have publicly referred to those videos as “Baby Stock Footage and Some Puppets We Found in the Dumpster Behind Hobby Lobby,” but watching the one about cars and trucks on my phone helped calm Cooper down, even as the doctors were sticking him with needles.
Is it odd that I want the names of all the other patients that were in the ER that night so I can thank them? I’m sure that’s odd. It’s just that even though each one of them was in there with their own problems, most of them much more severe than what Cooper was going through, and even though I’m sure their loved ones sitting next to them were all nervous wrecks, it was quite astonishing that as we wheeled Cooper down the hall for X-rays, every single one of them smiled and waved and said something encouraging, even if they were riddled with wires and tubes. They really didn’t have to do that.
And I know it’s dumb to want to thank all the doctors and nurses from the ER for being so reassuring and helpful because I know they were just doing their jobs. I’m sure they all learn in med school how to soothe a freaked out toddler who doesn’t know what’s going on, and how to soothe freaked out parents who don’t know what’s going on. So it’s dumb of me, I know, to want to thank them in some way for doing the exact thing they’ve been trained to do, and I shouldn’t even thank the security guard for yelling to Cooper, “So long and don’t come back!” when they discharged us, because I’m sure he uses that joke a lot.
But, anyway.
Thank you.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine and Instagram.com/kristencronin.
Tags: Beacon, Cooper, Cronin, febrile seizure
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photograph by Kristen Cronin
I enjoy repetition. Hand me a dozen carrots to dice, a hundred envelopes to seal, a thousand of my son Cooper’s tiny toy dinosaurs to put away every night. I do not get bored. I do not get frustrated. I revel in the Zen-like state of acceptance that comes after your hands have been doing the same thing for hours at a time. But even the Buddha had his limits.
I enjoy repetition. Some days at work, I just loop one long song, like Eluvium’s “Taken” or Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things,” for eight hours straight. I do not have the same tolerance for “Rappin’ Ernie Raps About Bathtime,” a 20-second shout-out to clean living that Cooper is constantly playing on the Cookie Monster toy iPod that a well-intentioned neighbor gave him one fateful and wicked day. Initially, the song is not without its charms. The beat is legit, the flow is smooth. “Stayin’ healthy and getting cleeeeeeeaaaaaan,” Ernie raps, the word “clean” slowly rolling out of his mouth like the stickiest of cough syrups. “We’re takin’ a bath, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN,” and Cooper and I would wave our arms in the air. After the 100th time, I stopped waving my arms in the air. I did not care. By the 500th time, I was beginning to wish that the eternal urban legend about Sesame Street deciding to kill off Ernie was true. By the 1,000th time, I was constructing a time machine so that I could go back to the Bronx in 1973, find DJ Kool Herc, and break both of his hands.
I enjoy repetition. There are certain books, like Robert Olmstead’s A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go or Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero that I read every two years. I do this in order to measure the journey of my life against theirs, to check in with their boundless wisdom and endless grace. Every reread illuminates. I cannot say the same for Maisy Makes Lemonade, a book that Cooper has insisted I read to him approximately 75 times a day for the past three weeks. I would provide a summary of the story, but the title already tells you every single thing that happens in the book. There is no rising action, no falling action, no graph of tension. Maisy makes lemonade and the book is over.
I enjoy repetition because I delight in the surprises and undiscovered nuances I find every time I return to something. There are no surprises or nuances in the things Cooper insists on experiencing over and over and over. Yet there he stands, happily jabbing the Cookie Monster toy iPod with his chubby fingers, Ernie’s rhymes drowning out my pleas for mercy.
I could, of course, smash the toy iPod to pieces when he’s sleeping. But I don’t. And even though Maisy Makes Lemonade is due back at the library soon, I have already ordered Cooper his own copy. Not because I am a glutton for punishment, but because when I try to see the world through his eyes I realize how important these routines are to him. When almost every thing you see, touch, and feel throughout the day is new, then the comforts of repetition become more than a security blanket: They are a way to prevent your brain from burning out. Being a toddler is hard enough. You understand little, and control nothing. You do not know why you are in pain, or how to find snacks, or who the man in the white coat is who keeps jabbing you with needles. But you know Mommy and Daddy, and Maisy making endless pitchers of lemonade. That is what you cling to in order to navigate your day. I enjoy repetition. Cooper needs it in order to survive.
I remind myself of this at the beginning and end of each day with Cooper, the two of us sitting together on the bed with the bright colors of Maisy Makes Lemonade laid out before us like a road map. The world is unpredictable. Here is one thing that is not. Maisy will make lemonade. The book will end. We will flip back to the beginning. Maisy will make lemonade. The book will end. We will flip back to the beginning. Maisy will make lemonade.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine and Instagram.com/kristencronin.
Tags: Beacon, books, Cooper, Cronin, Ernie, Maisy, Sesame Street
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photographs by Kristen Cronin
It begins with a quick “woof, woof”, then pawing at the window, then excitedly running around the room while barking in short, percussive blasts. I’m not talking about a dog. I’m talking about Cooper, who has just seen a dog outside the dining room window. His day is made.
Cooper is into dogs. Well, he’s also into cats and cows and horses and monkeys and foxes and owls and dinosaurs, but mostly he’s into dogs. Probably because dogs are like 18-month-old children who never grow up: They’re loud, fast, curious, and every time they poop it’s somehow your problem. Even their toys are interchangeable; I once tossed Cooper one of those doggie soccer balls with the ropes coming out of either end and he was enthralled for hours.
Here’s the problem: We don’t have a dog. We have cats, three of them. I’m happy to report that they are all wondrous companions who have never felt threatened or disturbed by Cooper’s arrival into our family. They run over with worried looks when he cries, and our indoor/outdoor cat, Dusty, follows Cooper around protectively whenever we go for walks around the neighborhood.
But they are not stupid. When Cooper runs towards them with outstretched arms and hands full of toy trucks, they know what they are in for. Bear hugs and tail tugs and accidentally taking a truck in the face. Cats, even the friendliest ones, are basically as affectionate as your average everyday Victorian dowager. Whereas dogs are always at their first rave in 1994, accidentally just took three hits of ecstasy and NEED TO GET AS CLOSE TO YOU AS POSSIBLE. Their desire for contact is limitless.
We spent Thanksgiving week down in South Carolina, visiting my mother-in-law (who owns a very small dog) and my father-in-law (who owns a very large dog). Both dogs were tireless fonts of affection. Cooper acted like a kid who has just discovered cotton candy for the first time (although I don’t think he HAS discovered cotton candy yet, so time will tell how apt this metaphor is). He could not believe that there were animals that actually wanted to be hugged and petted and followed around. And as Cooper and whichever dog we were visiting would collapse on the floor together in one tangled mass of fur and tongues and tiny shoes, someone would say, “Well it looks like you’re getting a dog.”
About that: I had always figured we’d end up getting a dog someday. But in my mind we would wait until Cooper was old enough to tell us how much he wanted a dog, about how he would do anything for a dog, about how he would always walk it and feed it and clean up after it. Then, and only then, would Kristen and I secretly make a trip to the local animal shelter one late December day, pick out a dog, and make sure it was wagging its tail happily under the Christmas tree on the morning of the 25th as Cooper staggered down the stairs into the living room. We would be, at least for one morning, the Best Parents Ever.
Now it looks like we might not be able to wait that long. It looks like I will not be waving to Cooper as he trudges out into a snowstorm to walk the dog while putting my feet up and drinking my coffee, content that the boy is building character and learning about responsibility. No, it’s going to be me standing in that blizzard with the dog while Cooper waves from the window and the cats drink my coffee. But for now, Cooper continues to bark at the dogs across the street, the cats are running to the basement to hide, and I’m left standing by the dining room table wondering how “someday” turned so quickly into “today.”
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine and Instagram.com/kristencronin.
Tags: Beacon, children, Cooper, Cronin, dogs
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photographs by Kristen Cronin
We are not the people in your neighborhood who never mow their lawn. We are worse than that.
We are the people who mow half of their lawn and then decide to take our son to play in the park because it’s a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon and there won’t be many of them left. Which would be fine if we made sure to finish mowing the lawn when we got back from the park. But instead, we take Cooper apple picking, we take him over to our neighbor’s house so he can play with her dog, we go out looking for hidden bridges and to chase fireflies, leaving our lawn to flourish in the late summer sun. Over time, this creates a tiered rice paddy effect, much to the derision and disgust of our neighbors. We are the worst.
When we get to our neighbor’s house, her dog runs down the stairs to meet Cooper and licks him all over his face. Cooper smiles and laughs and licks back. When we meet other dogs on our walks, Cooper licks their faces. When we get home and Cooper sees our cats, he lets out a delighted squeal and buries his face in their fur while wrapping his arms around them. Since he is still wet from the slobber of every dog we just met, the cat fur sticks to him and completely covers his body so that he soon resembles a baby Ewok. We let him do this because we are terrible.
The house is never clean. Between Cooper, three cats, and our insistence on cooking pretty much everything entirely from scratch, means that the sink is piled high even when the dishwasher is going, that the counters overflow with stacks of cookbooks, that enough cat hair remains scattered about to knit sweaters for the coming winter. Sometimes when Cooper is climbing up our long wooden staircase, I have to keep one hand behind him in case he falls and a dusting pad in the other hand, cleaning each step just before he gets to it. We keep meaning to sweep and mop the whole house and put everything away. But there are stories to be read aloud, puzzles to play with, long simmering sauces to pool over pasta and put on Cooper’s plate so that he can happily stuff his face. We are awful.
The CDs of lullabies and children’s songs that were given to us as gifts remain shrink-wrapped and unlistened to on the desk. Instead, we dance around the house to Dave Brubeck and Black Star, Nina Simone and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Sometimes on the way to daycare, I put on Ghostface Killah’s “The Champ,” since “Champ” is my nickname for Cooper. When Ghost raps about how other rappers are scared to step to me because I rip their guts out like a hysterectomy, Cooper laughs and wiggles his arms in time with the beat. I am a monster.
When it’s time for bed, we rifle through the giant pile of clean laundry, looking for pajamas. We gave up actually putting his clean laundry away because there’s always more of it coming down the pike, and because we are negligent. Instead, we just dump the next clean batch into his crib, which he never sleeps in anyway. Cooper still sleeps in our bed with us, which is dreadful and appalling and you should never do that. We keep meaning to transition Cooper out of our bed and into his crib, but then he gets sick, and then we’re travelling, and then we have house guests, and then there’s a bad thunderstorm and we don’t want him to be scared.
So once Cooper is in a pair of clean, crib-fresh pajamas, he runs down the hall to our room, trailed by tumbleweed-size balls of cat hair. We scoop him up and close the blinds, while the tall, tall grass sways gently in the night breeze. We turn on a white noise machine to drown out the sounds of our cats knocking books over and eating out of the sink. And Cooper curls up safe and warm between Kristen and me, the most dreadful, most appalling, absolute worst, worst, worst parents alive.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine.
Tags: Beacon, Cooper, Cronin, parents
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photo by Kristen Cronin
The boy and I were having problems. Problems involving storytime.
Storytime is serious business around the Cronin household. Has been since I was Cooper’s age. My mother still tells the story about the terrified phone call she got from my teacher on the first day of pre-school that began “Um, your son already knows how to read and he WON’T STOP READING ALL THE BOOKS.” My terrible eyesight is the result of reading Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary novels under the covers with a flashlight, even though it annoyed my college roommate. The main reason I wanted to have a kid in the first place was that it would give me an excuse to re-read all the Richard Scary books without looking like a weirdo. Before Cooper was even born, he had a whole bookcase filled with books waiting for him in his nursery. Sometimes late at night I’d run my fingers over their spines and picture myself sitting in a rocking chair with our son in my lap and What Do People Do All Day stretched out before us.
Cooper would have none if it. Storytime was agony to him. Whenever I would place him in my lap and begin to read, he would shoot me a tortured “Why are you doing this to me” look. By page 2 he would be squirming. By page 3 he would be crying. By page 4 he would be attempting to throw himself off of my lap and towards his toy blocks. I would read page 5 silently to myself while Cooper bounced a ball against the wall, cheerfully oblivious, free at last.
“How’s it going in here?” Kristen would say, peeking her head into the room. “Our son is a jock who hates books and is clearly adopted,” I’d reply.
I do not want to get a phone call on Cooper’s first day of pre-school informing me that whenever someone tries to read to him he fakes his own death. I needed a gateway drug, something to hook him. I thought about this one night when the three of us went out for a walk after dinner. And while I was lost in thought, an old blue pickup truck drove by us and Cooper pointed at it. “TW-OCK” he said.
Trucks. Trucks! Cooper was scarily obsessed with trucks. They were his weakness. And a weakness was all I needed.
I bought a book called My First 100 Trucks. It’s just (SPOILER ALERT) 100 pictures of trucks. I placed it in front of him one night when he was pushing his toy truck around. “Cooper, you know how you like trucks? Well, here are (SPOILER ALERT) 100 trucks that you can look at whenever you want!”
He looked at me, looked at the book, flipped it open to the first page, and blew his own mind.
We read now. We read all the time. When Cooper fusses and wails during diaper changes, I just hold a book in front of him and he goes still and complacent. When bathtime becomes a bore, we float a waterproof bathtime book over to him. He pulls books off his shelf himself now, and will run over to me, waving them, demanding. He happily sits in my lap as we read book after book after book. During a recent bout with the Coxsackie virus, the only thing that would stop him from crying was reading Maisy’s Bedtime. We read it over fifty times in a row. That is not a humorous exaggeration.
There is a voice in the back of my head telling me to be careful what I wish for, that I’ve created a monster, that he won’t be able to help me get around the house in my old age because he’ll be as blind as I am. I ignore that voice. Because the best part of my day is when we get home and he immediately runs into his room, pulls Pat the Bunny off the shelf, flips to the last page (“Can you say bye-bye? Paul and Judy are waving bye-bye to you.”), and then says “BYEEEEEEEEE” while waving at the page with a big smile on his face.
I’ve already picked out the flashlight he’s getting for Christmas.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. Check out their blog A Rotisserie Chicken and 12 Padded Envelopes at hvmercantile.com, and view more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine.
Tags: Beacon, Cronin, storytime
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photographs by Kristen Cronin
Some kids go right for the heart with their first word. They tell you what you want to hear. “Mama.” “Dada.” They curry favor, work the room like a 16th Century Italian diplomat. My first word was “Dada.” I was building alliances.
Some kids are aesthetes with their first word. They’ve become fascinated with something, and want to tell you about it. Kristen’s first word was “light.” She would point it out everywhere. Now she does the same thing, only with a camera. Was her interest in photography born when she was an infant, struggling to say her first word? I hesitate to say yes, as I am sure there are some of you reading this whose first word was “poop” or “pee” or “decaf“ and I don’t want to break your spirit. But yes.
And then there are the tool builders, the paradigm shifters, the ones who figure out that you can get more ants out of the hollow log with a sharp stick than with your fat, hairy fingers. They are unsentimental and goal-driven.
They have a plan.
Cooper’s first word was “that.” It was such a boring first word that for weeks I refused to believe he was saying it. I would tell Kristen that it didn’t count. It was like saying “and” or “it” or “or.” But Cooper was not looking for excitement. He was looking for more blueberries.
“That,” he’d say, pointing at the bowl of blueberries on the table. “That,” he’d say, pointing at a particular stuffed animal in the window of a store. “That, that, that,” over and over, insistently. How could we say no? He was using his words.
In addition to using it as a one word Manifest Destiny, Cooper uses “that” the way you or I use Google. “That,” he’ll say, pointing to a map on the wall. “That’s a map,” I tell him. His eyes widen and he points again.
“That.”
“That’s a map.”
“That.”
“Map.”
“That.”
“Map.”
“That.”
“Map.”
This goes on for at least fifteen minutes until he finds something else to point at and we repeat the cycle all over again until one of us falls asleep. I like to think that he’s storing all of this information away; that one day he’s going to wake up, look around the room, and say “That’s a map, that’s a picture, bed, cat, books, fan, window, I GOT THIS.”
I was worried his second word was going to be “this,” but so far I think it’s “truck.” At least it sounds like “truck” when he says it as he’s looking at a truck. It also sounds like “duck” when he’s looking at a duck, “suck” when he’s looking at the Mets’ bullpen, and gibberish when he’s looking at anything else. But I’m going to go with “truck,” as it dovetails with his new fanatical obsession with trucks, the way he will only let me read to him if it’s a book about trucks, the way he goes into a crying fit if we are out for a walk and we haven’t seen a truck in two minutes.
These fits of truck withdrawal are heartbreaking. During last night’s walk, in an effort to stop the tears, I pointed to Mt. Beacon. “Mountains are like the trucks of the earth,” I said. I will admit that this makes no sense whatsoever, but it got Cooper to stop crying and stare at the mountain with wide, silent eyes.
And isn’t that the point of language anyway, no matter how many words we know? To bring us to a place of stillness and quiet, beyond all words, where no communication is necessary? At least until the next truck rolls by. Then it’s all pointed fingers and that word that sounds like “truck,” over and over, louder and louder, echoing off the mountains and into the sky above.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine.
Tags: Beacon, Cronin, first word
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photographs by Kristen Cronin
The Azaleas are in full bloom, the fireflies are winking on at night, Orion has dipped below Mt. Beacon, not to be seen again until the Fall. The last time these things happened, my wife and I were driving up Route 9 at four in the morning in order to give birth to our first child. Now that Cooper’s first birthday is here, there is much to celebrate. But there is also a lot to take stock of and remember. Lately I have been trying to remember what a nervous wreck I was a year ago, wondering how I was going to be as a parent. Since Cooper has yet to be arrested or excommunicated, I think it’s safe to say we’re doing an ok job. But, there’s a lot about how your life changes during the first year of parenting that I wish I knew last June. So, if you or someone you know is about to become a parent, please take note of the following things:
1. Do you have a favorite, irreplaceable article of clothing? Put it in the attic for the next ten years.
2. You can never have enough bananas in the house. How many bananas are in your house? It’s not enough. Go get more bananas.
3. Lie face down on the floor in any room in your house. Look around. Take note of everything that you see at eye level. These things will be destroyed. You must therefore either move these things, or make peace with the impermanence of existence. Move onto the next room, repeat.
4. It will take time to accomplish the simplest things. This is ok. Just today I walked over to the side of the house to see how the early blooming blueberry bush was doing and to check if the berries were ready to harvest yet. It took thirty seconds. I had been meaning to do this for a week and a half.
5. Go through your cookbooks and recipes, making note of which ones can be prepared and cooked in advance. This is what you will be eating for the next year.
6. Tell your pets to hang in there. Understand how terrible it is for them to go from being pampered and showered with affection all the time to essentially being ignored. But once your kid gets just a little bit older, they will have a new best friend for life. This is worth it. One of my favorite things about this whole year is the way every time Cooper is outside our eldest cat Dusty follows him around, protectively.
7. That’s still not enough bananas. Go back to the store and buy all of the bananas they have.
8. Do not take your baby with you to buy beer, because when he grabs a bottle off the shelf, refuses to let it go, and then proceeds to try to pop the cap off with his teeth, you will look like the worst parent in the world. If such an outlandish thing were to actually happen, because, ha ha ha, don’t be silly, who takes their baby to buy beer? Ha ha ha. Let’s move on.
9. Poison ivy leaves and wild strawberry leaves look very much alike. This doesn’t really have anything to do with parenting, but it’s something I’ve learned the hard way recently and this seems like as good a place as any to share it.
10. Put down the energy drink or you will regret it later when your eyelids feel like they are stapled to your skull. Put on a pot of coffee instead, like a good and honest American.
11. Prolonged sleep deprivation leads to a host of rather unpleasant side effects, but one of the most important things it affects is your memory. And the first year is filled with things you never want to forget. So, do not ever feel guilty about taking one thousand photos, shooting one thousand videos, creating a one thousand page scrapbook, or writing a somewhat snarky monthly column about your experiences. You might think you will always remember the first time they hugged the cat, or when they learned to point, or that time they ate all the sushi on the table when no one was paying attention. You will not remember these things. These things will be lost forever unless you do something. Do something. Do anything. You will not get a second chance.
12. That’s all the bananas they had? Go to another store.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine.
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The Azaleas are in full bloom, the fireflies are winking on at night, Orion has dipped below Mt. Beacon, not to be seen again until the Fall. The last time these things happened, my wife and I were driving up Route 9 at four in the morning in order to give birth to our first child. Now that Cooper’s first birthday is here, there is much to celebrate. But there is also a lot to take stock of and remember. Lately I have been trying to remember what a nervous wreck I was a year ago, wondering how I was going to be as a parent. Since Cooper has yet to be arrested or excommunicated, I think it’s safe to say we’re doing an ok job. But, there’s a lot about how your life changes during the first year of parenting that I wish I knew last June. So, if you or someone you know is about to become a parent, please take note of the following things:
1. Do you have a favorite, irreplaceable article of clothing? Put it in the attic for the next ten years.
2. You can never have enough bananas in the house. How many bananas are in your house? It’s not enough. Go get more bananas.
3. Lie face down on the floor in any room in your house. Look around. Take note of everything that you see at eye level. These things will be destroyed. You must therefore either move these things, or make peace with the impermanence of existence. Move onto the next room, repeat.
4. It will take time to accomplish the simplest things. This is ok. Just today I walked over to the side of the house to see how the early blooming blueberry bush was doing and to check if the berries were ready to harvest yet. It took thirty seconds. I had been meaning to do this for a week and a half.
5. Go through your cookbooks and recipes, making note of which ones can be prepared and cooked in advance. This is what you will be eating for the next year.
6. Tell your pets to hang in there. Understand how terrible it is for them to go from being pampered and showered with affection all the time to essentially being ignored. But once your kid gets just a little bit older, they will have a new best friend for life. This is worth it. One of my favorite things about this whole year is the way every time Cooper is outside our eldest cat Dusty follows him around, protectively.
7. That’s still not enough bananas. Go back to the store and buy all of the bananas they have.
8. Do not take your baby with you to buy beer, because when he grabs a bottle off the shelf, refuses to let it go, and then proceeds to try to pop the cap off with his teeth, you will look like the worst parent in the world. If such an outlandish thing were to actually happen, because, ha ha ha, don’t be silly, who takes their baby to buy beer? Ha ha ha. Let’s move on.
9. Poison ivy leaves and wild strawberry leaves look very much alike. This doesn’t really have anything to do with parenting, but it’s something I’ve learned the hard way recently and this seems like as good a place as any to share it.
10. Put down the energy drink or you will regret it later when your eyelids feel like they are stapled to your skull. Put on a pot of coffee instead, like a good and honest American.
11. Prolonged sleep deprivation leads to a host of rather unpleasant side effects, but one of the most important things it affects is your memory. And the first year is filled with things you never want to forget. So, do not ever feel guilty about taking one thousand photos, shooting one thousand videos, creating a one thousand page scrapbook, or writing a somewhat snarky monthly column about your experiences. You might think you will always remember the first time they hugged the cat, or when they learned to point, or that time they ate all the sushi on the table when no one was paying attention. You will not remember these things. These things will be lost forever unless you do something. Do something. Do anything. You will not get a second chance.
12. That’s all the bananas they had? Go to another store.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine.
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Tags: Beacon, Cooper, Cronin, first birthday
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by Brian PJ Cronin, photo by Kristen Cronin
My son has a new favorite new game. It’s called How Fast Can I Throw Every Single Thing In This Room Down On The Floor Even The Intangible Things Like Hope. He is very good at this game.
At first I thought there was something specific he was searching for. It would explain the frantic sense of duty he brings to this game, the speed, the thoroughness, the way he examines each item he grabs ever so slightly before throwing it down on the floor. But no, there is nothing he can find that will make him stop. He just wants to throw everything in the room down on the floor. Once that’s done he crawls, laughing, onto the next room. Time for Level Two.
Cooper’s second favorite game is What Is That Thing You Are Holding Give It To Me Now Now Now. It begins when he notices that you are holding An Interesting Thing. It does not matter what the thing is – your phone, keys, food, a live animal – he will stretch out his arms, widen his eyes, and start babbling. If you hold out, he begins crying tears that are somehow the size of his entire head. Then comes the screaming. If you cave in and hand him whatever it is he wants so badly, he will immediately throw it on the floor. Turns out he was secretly playing the first game all along.
When Cooper was born, our doula told us that she had a premonition that he was going to be a bit of a trickster. (Long story. Foxes were involved.) This prophecy failed to jibe with the little boy we had come to know throughout the first ten months of his life. This sweet little boy, a trickster? The one who’s always smiling, always laughing, always eager to give a hug to anyone who approaches him? The only one in daycare who didn’t cry when Santa Claus came to visit? Maybe those weren’t foxes our doula saw in the pre-dawn light last June. Maybe they were Muppet Babies.
But lately Cooper’s personality has become a bit more nuanced. He has begun questioning the natural order of things around our house. Why do I have to have my diaper changed? Why do I have to go to sleep now? Why can’t I touch this blazing hot light bulb? I know I burned my hand the last time I touched it, but who’s to say this time won’t be different? And, my personal favorite: What happens if, in the middle of the night, as you are holding me and walking into a totally dark room, I knock your glasses off your face? How useless does that make you?
In short, Cooper has reached the age at which he understands there are such things as boundaries, but has not quite reached the age at which he understands that there are such things as consequences. “Not a toy,” I will tell him as I point to my glasses. “Not a toy.” He’ll look at me thoughtfully for a few seconds, to give the appearance that it’s all sinking in, and then knock them off my face again. Then he’ll smile, as if to say, “What are you going to do, punish me? I don’t even know what that is.”
So I sigh and put my glasses back on and remind myself that as long as we keep setting boundaries, and keep those boundaries in place, he’ll soon figure out that he’s not supposed to break them. But maybe he won’t.
Maybe this is who he is.
If so, I take comfort in the fact that he’s also still the sweet little boy who is willing to give everyone at daycare a hug, that he still squeals with delight whenever he sees a cat or a dog, that he still gives us a huge smile when he first wakes up in the morning. And I savor how eagerly he snuggles between us at night with a contented grin on his face, as we all curl up together like foxes in a burrow.
Brian PJ and Kristen Cronin live in Beacon with their three cats, and their son Cooper James Cronin. View more of their photos at www.flickr.com/teammoonshine.
Tags: Beacon, boundaries, Cronin
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