Favoratism.

I noticed recently that I like my niece a whole more than I like my nephew. This makes me a terrible person.

It's not his fault, it's just that he has a long was to go before he is nearly as cool as his sister. She was pretty interesting when she was learning how to walk and talk and stuff, but she's way more exciting now that she has ideas and questions and plays pretend. Meanwhile, her brother just turned two, and the walking and talking stuff seems pretty boring by comparison.

It doesn't help that my niece was speech-delayed and then caught up very suddenly, leading me to believe that language acquisition was a fairly expedient process. I totally thought that kids started talking and then used that as their primary form of communication.

Actually, it turns out that language acquisition is a very slow process that begins with the kid pointing at things and making sounds. According to people with kids, this counts as "talking". My nephew has been "talking" for a year now and I still hear nothing but gibberish. The adults he has lived with (my sister, her husband, and my parents up until a year ago) all know what those sounds mean, and can't understand why I don't respond when he babbles a string of syllables at me.

I assume he will eventually start speaking intelligible words like a normal person, but for now our linguistic divide makes it difficult for us to relate. I am perpetually finding things to bring my niece, usually stuff I was going to get rid of and realized she would enjoy. This means I almost always come bearing treasures for her, usually with nothing for my nephew. I imagine at some point I will start finding things for him too, probably when he gets more interesting and less equally amused by binoculars and paper towel rolls. Otherwise I have no idea how I'm going to handle my desire to bring bags of wonderful things just for niece.

Babies.

Whenever I make eye contact with a baby without its keeper watching, I stare at it to see if I can make it cry.

Satire.

I managed to make it almost all the way through the university without taking the required writing course. My high school Advanced Placement work really should have gotten me out of such a basic skills class, but eventually I just gave in and did it so I could graduate. This is how I ended up in Freshman Writing 101 the first semester of my senior year.

It was 8am on the first day of the semester and, with the exception of summer school, the first college class ever for most of the students. The essay was on childhood obesity. I finished my essay first and was the first to volunteer when the professor asked someone to stand up and read for the class.

I got an A for my well-written, logical argument for eliminating childhood obesity. As a bonus, I also traumatized an entire class full of fresh-out-of-high-school students who had never read A Modest Proposal with my cold and emotionless delivery. The next person to volunteer was the other senior in the class.

We had written our essays at the same time with zero discussion beforehand, and had obviously come to the same conclusion at the same time: You can propose whatever you like, no matter how preposterous, and get an A as long as your paper was well-thought-out and well-written. I like to think the freshman learned a valuable lesson that day, but I never got to find out because none of them would talk to me the rest of the semester.

Babies twitch.

My sister has a baby. He's about two months old, meaning he is pretty much just an external fetus. Newborns creep me out.

They twitch. They gurgle. Their eyes don't focus, and every body movement they make just screams "SOMETHING IS NEUROLOGICAL IS WRONG HERE!" Of course, they move like that because their brains aren't fully developed yet. It probably says something about my life experiences when a newborn immediately sets off the 'brain damage/defect' bells in my head rather than the reverse.

New Baby.

So my sister had another baby. The last one screamed nonstop pretty much from birth to around 9 months.

This one is pretty much dead.

Not that she's actually swinging him around by his feet, but he really doesn't wake up for anything. He's boring even for a newborn. Having seen both ends of the spectrum, I'm finding the screamy kid at least had some character.

Terrible Two's.

My niece is two-and-a-half. After a whole lot of developmental therapy, she's finally caught up with her language skills. I was a bright and extremely articulate two-year-old, and it wasn't until now that I realized most kids that age are still sticking two or three words together and not having full-blown conversations. Also, they are largely unintelligible to people who don't talk to them every day.

I've concluded that two-year-olds are pretty boring, and I'm dying for my niece to get to the stage where she starts asking 'why?' so I can explain the world to her. Watching a kid develop is pretty damned slow, it seems like her milestones just get further and further apart. I absolutely cannot wait until she turns into a real person, it feels like I've been waiting for eternity. Maybe she'll turn out to be really fun in another year or so. Right now she's just kind of fun.

Thing I Can't Talk About with Regular People #25

I went to a company party with Z. His boss and the boss's wife were there with their baby. She's about a year old with orange hair and green eyes, exactly the kind of baby I want to have.

I need to add "stealing people's babies" to this list.