Limits

Edith is continuing to put me through my paces. She has finally clicked to the fact that I am not merely an extension of her, and so now she is experimenting with to what extent she can make me behave like one. All weekend, she followed me around the house slowly and relentlessly like the entity from It Follows in baby form. If I were sitting in the playroom and she wandered off elsewhere and then wanted to return, she’d then face me from wherever she had ended up and wail at me for several beats. If I didn’t hop up and come fetch her, she would crawl back toward me a few paces and then try it again. By this method, she discovered at what exact distance I was willing to come to her rather than the other way around.

She is perfectly capable of holding her own bottle by this point, but she shows absolutely no desire to do so. Instead, she currently feeds fully reclined on a little pillow with her head tipped back and her arms flung out to either side, while I hold the bottle in her mouth for her and follow her around with it if she wants to look from side-to-side. When she wants to pause from drinking, she knows how to pull off the bottle, but she now prefers to slap it impatiently to one side, spraying milk across the playroom. If she isn’t finished, she will prop her head up briefly, look me dead in the eyes and say, “mmwwwaaahhh!!!!” at which point, I will resume feeding position and she will flop back down.

Booster nap finally bit the dust this morning. She seemed to be slowing down, so I took her to bed, but no matter how long I wrestled with her, she wouldn’t quiet. She was like an aging comedian, impossible to suppress. So we got back up and an hour later, she was screaming at me relentlessly. “Well, it’s too late now!” I told her. “You didn’t want to sleep earlier, so now you just have to push through.”

When the nanny arrived, Edith flew down the hall to her as if she were being rescued from an island, and I tried very hard not to feel offended.