Birthday Boy

Having a baby is, in some ways, like conducting a controlled experiment testing your unfounded beliefs about cause and effect in your own life.

Like my certainty that sleeping eight hours a night makes me smarter. (Or the corollary that having a baby has made me much, much stupider.) Or my faith that the more I practice yoga the more good things will happen to me. (Hey, it introduced me to Hubby, and I'm sure hoping my Asheville yoga classes bring some focus to an otherwise meandering life. Which leads me to feel quite certain that I will lose my way forever and spend the rest of my life searching for some shred of meaning to my sad existence because I have to miss a week of yoga while The Boy's school is closed for the holidays.)

Yesterday I received a damaging confirmation of my unfounded belief that a bit of indulgence, however deserved, is simply not without consequences.

Curse ye fates! For when is indulgence more deserved than on one's first birthday? When should one expect consequence-free pointless pleasure? If not on one's first birthday, then never??? The thought is too sad to contemplate.

Not that The Boy exactly leads a life of asceticism. Still, when a body is that young and unsullied, parents like me and Hubby tend to obsess over every perceived pollutant -- from the fears of off-gassing that led us to buy an unfinished crib that we got rid of a month later when it turned out to pose a strangulation threat, to our fear of medication that faded greatly once we realized that a simple dose of Tylenol will actually make a teething or feverish or ear-infection-afflicted boy feel much, much better, to our insistence on all-natural house cleaning products except when the chemical ones work a lot better.

For all these reasons, and probably a few more too embarrassing to admit, The Boy approached his first birthday without ever having experienced first-hand the dubious pleasures of wheat and dairy.

In this case, our parental craziness was not without foundation. Among the other joys of breastfeeding The Boy and I shared was the discovery that he had more than a few food allergies -- dairy among them. We never tested wheat because I don't eat it myself, as I have what I like to call a "sensitivity" to it which doubtless belongs above on my list of unfounded beliefs about cause and effect in my life.

Still, Hubby has the dreaded peanut allergy, and it's hereditary, so in this case, I am allowed to harbor crazy fears about food on behalf of The Boy.

But a first birthday is a first birthday, and cake and ice cream were a must. So we invited some neighbors to join us in some afternoon cake eating, and, in the meantime, did the other things that make first birthdays so special.

Like first birthday presents. The Boy chose just one to open in the morning -- a little piano with real keys that make sounds whether you bang them with your fingers or with the little plastic German boy you like to carry around in your mouth or with the wooden blocks your grandmother gave you.

Small toy pianos are also good for hoisting yourself up to standing, an increasingly favored activity that suggests walking is right around the corner. (An event to await breathlessly or one to dread as one spots all the dangers lurking in the house? Discuss.) And when you really get warmed up, you can bang a few times, pull yourself up, and warble away. The Boy, in short, was thrilled with his first birthday gift.

By the time he had figured out how to pull the top off the piano (not a deliberate design feature) the morning rain had cleared up and a perfectly gorgeous, un-December-like day had begun. So, post-nap, we loaded The Boy in the car for a walk in the nearby Botanical Gardens on the UNC Asheville campus.

Actually, even if it had been pouring rain, we would have found an excuse to put The Boy in the car. Because there is one event that accompanies turning a year old that is even more magnificent, of even great importance, perhaps the most exciting thing ever and even better than cake and ice cream.

Turning the car seat around to face forward.

The Boy found this new situation a hoot. He laughed all the way to the botanical gardens. He grinned and clapped and kicked his feet. We wondered if we shouldn't have waited to turn around his car seat until our next ten-hour drive to St. Louis in the spring.

We returned from the botanical gardens with time to open another gift before our cake-eating neighbors arrived.

This one, from Grandma, was a wooden box, full of beautiful wooden blocks, with wheels and a string for pulling. The Boy grabbed the blocks faster than I could put them back in the box in a losing effort to keep them out of the reach of dogs' teeth. So far all are still accounted for, but it's only been a day and the dogs have been out in the yard a lot.

With neighbors came yet more gifts -- a set of construction trucks with the wheels that are a current source of fascination and a musical thing that talks a lot and flashes lights and I haven't figured out. The Boy likes it a lot. I don't think I will for long.

And then there we were, with our new neighbors sharing a glass of wine (with us) and cake (with The Boy). We sure wouldn't be doing this in Long Beach.

The Boy approached the piece of cake Hubby placed on his high chair tray cautiously, as is his nature. A little pinch of cake, another little pinch.

And then he figured it out. Cake is to be eaten by holding great huge pieces and shoving them as far in your mouth as they can go.

Inexplicably, we have no pictures of this joy. We decided it was high time we figure out how to use the video camera I bought Hubby for Father's Day. It has snippets of The Boy at six and seven months that I like to play back for myself from time to time, but the technological challenge of putting them on line for others to enjoy has stymied me. Maybe if Audrey hadn't chewed the necessary USB cable two months ago I'd be more motivated. Or maybe I ought to be more motivated to buy a new USB cable. At any rate, if you want to see The Boy eating birthday cake, you will have to either come visit and view it on the video camera or buy us a new USB cable or wait until his second birthday.

Also inexplicably, we gave The Boy as much ice cream as he wanted. I do not know why it occurred to neither of us to stop after the first bowl. Indulgence is one thing when you can chide yourself with your own stupidity as you find yourself huddled in a cold bathroom at 3:30 in the morning wishing like you've never wished for anything before that you could be back in your own bed sleeping.

The only immediate effect of the cake and ice cream was a sugar rush of which I've never seen the likes before. If The Boy could walk, he would have run laps around the house. As it was, he repeatedly threw himself at one of our neighbors, demanding that she pick him up, then, with a screech of delight, threw himself back at the floor so he could crawl after her and once again grab at her legs and haul himself up to ask to be picked up again. Luckily, her own children are grown and she doesn't have a grandchild handy so she was more than happy to help The Boy out.

And MORE gifts to open after the guests left and before the sugar high wore off. The Boy banged his piano impatiently while Hubby assembled the wooden walker. The second the handle was secure, he grabbed it with both hands, stood, and pushed it out of the living room and into the foyer.

This act would not seem so remarkable if The Boy knew how to walk.

Apparently, he realized that he can not, in fact, walk after he pushed the walker into the front door. At this point, he opted to crawl it back to the living room, a reasonably impressive feat, but not one worth videotaping.

By the time we made it through the animal book with the prominent basset hound puppy and the magnetic animals he might or might not recognize as resembling his bath toys and therefore as being related to the funny sounds Mommy and Daddy make with them when he's in the bath and the electronic drum that is just as annoying when you elect the Spanish option he was too tired to see straight.

So we gave him a birthday bath and he fell asleep drinking his birthday bottle.

Which would be a lovely end to the story of the Birthday Boy. But then there'd be no moral. Not that I need a moral. A wonderful, fun, sunny first birthday is all I need, and I'll speak for The Boy on that as well.

But ice cream and cake, it seems, can hurt one's tummy come nine thirty. And sleeping with Mommy when one's tummy is hurting and one has spotted Daddy saying goodnight before heading for the day bed in the office is not much fun come eleven o'clock. Especially when Mommy's chest is kind of bony and uncomfortable and she is not bright enough to figure out that those screams are borne of rage, not pain, and all you really want is your Daddy.

Or maybe she's just tired and warm in the bed and a little bit offended that she's not good enough for you and therefore pretends not to know what you really want for five or ten minutes.

Ultimately, The Boy spent the night of his first birthday sleeping it off with Daddy while I was the one on the day bed in the office. Which I guess is only fair, since a year ago he'd spent an awful lot of time sleeping close to me.

Besides, it turns out one can get a pretty good night's sleep on the day bed in the office where no babies are kicking you and no husbands are snoring and you can sleep off your own over-indulgence in ice cream and, yes, cake. Because occasionally ignoring your own unfounded beliefs about your "sensitivity" to wheat doesn't mean you can't go right back to them the very next day.