Baby Talk

My son is now a little over 2 months and he’s started to make small unintelligible noises.  “Goo goo ga ga” are not accurate representations of the noises babies make but I guess they’re close enough.  If you read books and stuff, they’ll say “your baby is talking to you!” but I would disagree.  When my son asks me to pass the salt, that will be talking to me.  Right now, he’s just making noises.  Very cute noises, to be sure, but still just noises.  Actually I doubt he’ll ever ask me to pass the salt though – Mina will probably have thrown out all the salt in our house by then.  What a food Nazi.

But in any case, these same books or doctors will tell you to talk to your babies, that talking to them stimulates their learning or some other kind of scientific mumbo jumbo.  So sometimes, I’ll sit with Josiah and stare at him while he stares blankly at me and try to talk to him.  Inevitably, the conversations always go like this…

-So… how was your day?

Drool.

-Mm hmm… I see.  So what’s new?

More drool.

-Did you do anything cool at all today?

Starts crying.

This is when I shout for my wife to come “fix the baby, he’s crying.”  I feel so much pressure to start an interesting stimulating conversation with him but I can’t!  I don’t know what to talk to him about.  Sometimes, it even just devolves into ME making baby noises at him, and he’ll make baby noises back at me, but that’s not helping ANYBODY’s development!  And then I just get mad because he tricked me into talking like him.

It was exactly like this with his mother when we started dating too.  I’d unavoidably feel the need to come up with some witty banter or deep conversation topics so she’d let me take her out for ice cream again and I’d just end up saying something stupid making her roll her eyes or look at me with a deeply bored expression.  Seriously, why did she marry me again?

But I’m in the same exact place again!  Now I’m trying to entertain a baby and trick him into thinking that I’m a cool dad!  SO.  MUCH.  PRESSURE.  What does he want to talk about?  What do I say to stimulate his tiny meatball sized brain?  I DON’T KNOW STOP STARING AT ME WITH THOSE ADORABLE EYES!

Sigh.  Ok.  Here just eat this ice cream when Mommy’s not looking.  And if you laugh like crazy when she walks by, I’ll give you a dollar.  After all this time, I’m still in the same place – trying to impress my wife.

Looks like Josiah is not impressed either.