Eons ago, when my husband and I were footloose and fancy-free, we took our belated honeymoon to Italy. It was several years after we were married, but no less sweet and we thoroughly enjoyed all the pleasures that Italia had to offer.

Not least of which were the fabulous ruins at the base of Mount Vesuvius, magnificently petrified in a violent hail of ashes and mud. We went to both Pompeii and Herculaneum, and because we were trying our best to shed our American dollars to the tourist industry, we had to purchase a few doobobs and trinkets to bring back for the folks back home.

My personal favorite was a keychain of a statue unearthed in Herculaneum of the god Hercules. Apparently freshly returned from hunting (or playing cricket), his club is swung over one shoulder and he’s got a nice animal skin to show for his prowess. The statue is remarkable for it’s realism: you can practically smell the fumes of wine leaching from Herc’s pores as he teeters back with his Johnson in his hand to take a whiz. He’s been celebrating, it seems.

Anyway, I loved it so much I bought a bunch of them and gave them away to slightly quizzical friends and family. I’m the only one that actually used Herc for a keychain; everyone else quietly tucked them away in the bottom of their junk drawers and promptly forgot that a god was taking a leak in them.

Hercules has been dangling drunkenly from my keys until a few months ago when his little metal ring broke and he began swimming unmoored amongst the receipts and lip balms in my handbag. Every now and then I would find him, linty but no less loaded, and think about affixing him again to my lonely keys who missed the endless party. But I never did, and Hercules has been pissing unfettered in my purse ever since.

The not-such-a-bun-anymore found him the other day. The bun has been completely entranced by the occult mysteries of “the handbag” of late, and I think that the discovery of my little drunk buddy didn’t disappoint him in the inscrutability of the feminine purse. He held him reverently in his hands and turned him over and over again, looking at this little man peeing endlessly with sincere awe. I wondered how I would explain what he was doing there. Obviously too young to understand what being loaded is, I had no idea what he thought of him, my little idol to the carelessness of youth and revelry.

I suppose it doesn’t matter. I just hope that three years from now when Herc is still floating around down there awash in those same receipts I’ve never chucked that the bun doesn’t pick-pocket him and take him to school for show and tell.

It seems that we took matters into our own hands a little too late.

The bun, who is really far less bun-like and more boy-like these days but closely resembles the gravity-defying high-flying squirrel monkey, is not really talking as of yet. It seems it’s not a priority with him; instead he reserves his energies for learning how to climb onto the counter to play with the coffee maker, dismantling the safety gadgets employed to keep him from being electrocuted, and hauling the kitchen step stool from one verboten area to the next in search of new dastardly and daring feats to keep his parents on their toes. In this he is very effective.

But talking really hasn’t been a pressing issue for him. He signs the important words: “cat” is well represented as he chases them through the house at top speed and they flee in terror. His few vocal utterances include a variety of words that sound the same: juice, shoes, keys, cheese, represent generally important parts of his world. He calls me “Imama” instead of “Mama,” which is really my fault since I would always point to my chest and say “I’m mama!” His father is either “Papa” or, more mysteriously, “Arf” which we have to conclude is from a book in which Lars would read the concluding lines “I’m a dog! I’m a dog! I’m a dog!”

“Star” is very clear, although sounds a lot like “Stick” which seems to have been conflated in his mind; both are now “St-rck.” Moon is “Nononono” which is confusing since I’m never sure whether he’s talking about the moon or vociferously questioning the moon’s existence. And of course he says “No” like a champion. If you’re going to have a word, that’s a good one to have.

But the rest of the English language doesn’t seem too important to him. Occasionally he’ll pop out a new word unbidden and we’re thrilled, although he may retire it as quickly as it came. Other times an adopted word clings to him like a barnacle and he repeats it over and over, lulling himself to sleep with it, singing it like a mantra during car rides, showing it off for all admirers.

Take, for example, his newest word, “Fuck.” Or more precisely, “Oh, fuck.”

That one popped out in a car ride in which his papa, almost getting blind-sided or missing a turn or something said quite naturally, “Oh fuck!”

A clear, high note rang from the back seat: “Ofuck.” We looked at each other. The prophesied early curse word had sprung from the lips of our darling boy, tolling the ribald words of a bawdy house in the dulcet tones of innocence. “Ofuck. Ofuck. Ofuck,” he intoned in the back seat as his eyes gazed out the window at the passing landscape.

We realized we were too late. Just the week before we had been talking about the necessity of curbing our colorful language around the bun. But it’s difficult to take an amorphous deadline seriously, when the guardian of the deadline hardly says anything at all. We had time, we thought.

We were wrong, apparently. Now we’re scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and every time we hear him say, “Ofuck,” we say, “Truck? Where’s the truck?” or “Duck? What a nice duck!” but he’s no dummy and our pathetically belated ministrations seem doomed. Even though we’ve more or less eradicated the ever-useful, always practical “Fuck” from our vocab, just yesterday “Oh, shit” propelled from my lips as a bottle of some viscous, sticky goo was administered to the floor through the diligence of our young scion. He hasn’t mastered “O-shit,” but he recognized enough similarity of experience to pull out that old chestnut, “Ofuck” from the small but mighty arsenal of words at his disposal.

Sometimes we hear him practicing to himself in his crib over the baby monitor, honing each syllable with razor-sharp precision. “Ofuck,” he sings to himself. “Oooohfuck,” he says more slowly, rolling the sounds around on his tongue. Of course the irony is not lost on us that he can barely say our names (”Imama” and “Arf”) but can pronounce the one word we wish he wouldn’t say with perfect clarity.

Not quite epic, but close.

I actually tried to reason with the bun this morning by showing him his father’s keys, a picture of keys, and asking where mine were. He just took dad’s keys and put them in the bookcase between The Insult and A Catcher in the Rye.
Meanwhile, Dad looked in the last place possible, a sealed trash can which had boxes on top of it. Too difficult for the bun? No way! He even replaced the lid so we’d never suspect that my keys were festering there.

Interesting. I wonder what else is missing.

The signs of desperation include, but are not limited to, feeding the bun cheesecake for dinner to which he turns up his nose.

Went to Vegas for a wedding with the tot. Now he’s running around the house with a pair of my panties on his head.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

I think that the human characters Luis and Maria from Sesame Street have been cryogenically preserved. It is otherwise impossible that they still live on Sesame Street.

It’s been a month since we’ve been plumping the bun. We stick him on the scale every day and wish another ounce on him. We chase him around with buttered bread, milk with half and half in it, pasta with cheese and egg sauce. He laughs and eats more fruit. I think he’s just about the same as before, but my husband, traditionally both more hypochondriacal and more pessimistic about doctors in general than I am, has been optimistically seeing the ounces inch up. Tomorrow we’ll see who’s right; the bun’s got a follow-up doctor visit.

Either way, we’ve decided that cheating is the only sure-fire way to get them to leave us alone, so no matter what we’re putting rocks in his diapers for the weigh-in.

Where does one begin? With the mortgage debacle, days to closing on the new house and learning that we may not be approved for one of our loans? Or maybe the movers dropping our furniture on the pavement? Perhaps the foundation problems that were discovered in our old house after putting it on the market, when we couldn’t go ahead and fix it, but had to wait for all the inspectors to give estimates of the enormous sums of cash it was going to take to make the problem go away? How about carrying three mortgages while waiting for one house to sell after already moving into the other?
Or maybe I should just begin at the end of all that. Maybe that’s where the story resumes.

Because that was the day that we took the bun to the doctor for a routine appointment for his booster shots. It was an errand that was completely innocent after dealing with the minions of evil called loan officers trying to get our house taken care of. We had other fish to fry. A couple of shots? No big deal.

The nurse weighed him and measured him at the start, as she always does. And then she eyed him and his chart suspiciously. She weighed him again. She measured his head. She looked at the chart again. She chatted in that sing-songy way that belied the fact that there were concerns. She took the chart with her and left my husband and me to stew, the bun fidgeting like a greased pig in a diaper.

“I don’t think I can take one more thing,” I said. “I think I’m going to snap.” Running from the office was preferable to anything I could learn from the doctor about the fate of my little boy because I was literally incapable of handling it; months of stress and virtually running on fumes, I was left with no reserves of sanity to deal with the possible ramifications of health problems.

And then the doc came in, usually so cheerful that he bordered on annoying, but now wearing his studied “Doctor bestowing news” expression. He grilled us about the bun’s diet. He asked us if he ate meat, eggs, cheese, vegetables. How often did we feed him? How many snacks? What was he drinking? When were his naps? How much did he sleep at night? Poop color? Smell?

As he grilled us, I began to shut down. Words filtered through my head in bursts, but they attached to nothing concrete, no sensible diagnosis: “potential liver concerns,” “tenth percentile,” “could indicate heart problems.” The words were alarming but made no sense: the bun was running us ragged, he was so strong he could burst free from our arms with hardly trying, he raced non-stop from dawn until dark when he finally dropped from complete fatigue every night. My husband was paying rapt attention to the doctor. I was staring at the industrial carpet.

“…failure to thrive…”

The phrase pulled me out of my wide-eyed coma. Failure to thrive? Where were we?

When one thinks of children cursed with the failure to thrive, you imagine the distended bellies of starving children in the Sudan. Maybe you picture preemies who were born two months too early. Chinese infant girls in orphanages, or post-Soviet bloc Slavic countries beleaguered by war for years. But this was our son. Taking a good hard look at him, you could hardly accuse him of not thriving.

He was smart and funny and mischievous. He wriggled and wiggled and ran and laughed and made mockeries of our own health every single day. He was engaged and engaging and curious and intense. He hardly seemed like he was “failing to thrive.”

But this baby, our bun, had been so fat that he topped the percentiles for his first months. Now he had dropped into the tenth percentile for length and weight. He hadn’t gained a single pound in six months.

They ran tests. Blood tests, urine tests. They taped a plastic bag to his tender little johnson so that they could get a urine sample, and then gave him his shots hoping that a good dose of pain would ramp up the pee response. Knowing an insult when he sees one, he simply shrieked. Determined to get the pee, they kept the baggie on when they drained him of his blood just like the vampires they are, but by his nature contrary just like his parents, he gave them nothing. Not a single yellow drop. I was very proud.

However, this left us with the task of catching a pee sample from a 15 month old. Cursed with the terror of having a baby with a “failure to thrive” we now had to chase him around the house with a tupperware container as he ran naked gleefully through the house, sprinkling as he went. The tiny target was too quick for us, and though we plotted the best possible course of action for trapping toddler pee, the upstairs was christened with a number of puddles and an unfortunate nugget before the night was through. Finally, as his papa showed him how the big boys do it, with me poised under the bun’s nethers, I trapped a scant millimeter of pee. I put the lid on. It seemed an awful lot of work for such a little reward.

That night was another sleepless one. Most nights that I’m plagued with insomnia, I just pretend that eventually I’ll fall asleep and toss and turn in bed. But that night I just got up, knowing that all I would think about was our baby. Was he dying? Were we starving him? Was he failing to thrive because we were terrible terrible parents? How was that possible? How could he be dying? I painted the entire kitchen that night.

When the tests came back, they were, as the doctor said, “as boring as boring could be.” We assume this is a good thing. We know that we have to be concerned about his weight, and the doctor himself prescribed what for us weight-conscious adults can only regard as the “dream diet:” a high fat, high cholesterol dairy delight. Cheese, butter, eggs, fat. Ice cream. Sausage. Full cream yoghurt. It was possibly the finest prescription I had ever heard, and yet the bun would never fully appreciate the glory of eating pasta carbonara without a care in the world.

With the gift of time, I have begun to panic much less. I recognize that the doctor was being alarmist to some degree. There are concerns, but if you just take a good look at us, his parents, we’re no giants. I’m five feet tall. What do they expect? Kareem Abdul Jabar? The fact that he was enormous as an infant might have as easily raised red flags as his small size now. Glandular problems? Could have been! I mean, he was a PORKER! He was enormous! He was downright bizarre!

It has been educational, as they say. The houses have been dealt with, I’ve been painting every waking moment that the bun isn’t tugging on my pantleg (meaning, I only paint when he’s sleeping), and I’m assuming that the bun, despite the doctor’s misgivings, is doing just fine because he keeps me on my toes and I’m pretty sure I’m no slouch. He’s adorable and funny and just started saying his first words “Buh-bye.” He signs like a madman, dances like a champ, and loves hide and seek behind the new curtains. We chase him around with triple-cream French cheese and quiche, pasta with cream sauce and kefir. All he wants to eat is mango and raisins. But at least he likes fruit and vegetables; some kids think you’re trying to murder them if you slip them a green bean. I figure we’re ahead of the game.

Hope all is well with you. We’ve finally come out of the tunnel, I think. I hope. Cheers.

There are moments when you have to ask yourself, “Did I encourage this behavior? Did I create a monster?”

That sinking feeling comes when you note that your normally well-balanced tot is lying on the floor to get a close-up on your bare feet so that he can chew on your toes. And you move your toes, because, well, ick. But he follows your feet trying to track the elusive piggies, and you realize that you’re embarrassed in a way specific to events like someone’s pet parrot pooping on your shoulder or a toy poodle humping your leg at a party. You want him to spontaneously scoop himself up from the floor rather than to push him away yourself, losing interest in your digits, and you wonder why on earth he wants to suck them in the first place?

And then you realize, you chew on his feet all the time. You and your husband may have, in cheerful innocence while making diaper-changing less boring, created a foot diva by chewing his tiny little toes in mock ravenous hunger. “He’s going to be out with some adorable girl and she’s going to say, ‘You know, you’re really cute but I don’t know about the shrimp job thing,’ said my husband.

The truth is, it’s all in good fun. I’m sure we’re scarring him in plenty of other ways that are less overt than making a foot fetishist out of him.

As predicted, moving with a bun is less than optimal, although I haven’t decided to trade him in yet. Unfortunately, I also have the worst case of laryngitis I’ve ever had (not even a squeak could pass these lips until about an hour ago–and now I’m back to silence again) which renders loan discussions pretty much moot, and I had to use my husband as a translator with a contractor which was pretty much a comedy of errors.

Trying to corral the bun when I can’t holler a good “BUN!” at him for effect has forced me into creative discipline. Shiny things have their place; I can dangle them in front of him and hope they distract him enough that he doesn’t yank the glassware that I just packed over on himself. It’s worked so far.

So being sick and mute, while packing and chasing a tiny force of nature from room to room? I felt just about ready for a soak around 4:00 pm.

Leaving him in the exhausted arms of my husband, who has also been chasing him hither and yon, I drew a hot bath and tucked in with a Harper’s. But the bun has, on top of being a “sprinter” and an “explorer” been a “whiner” and a “back archer” today, flinging himself to and fro like a petulant starlet dissatisfied with the service. And so my bath was punctuated by ear-pricking keening and the occasional fit of pique.

My poor husband kept trying to keep him from the door, but the bun knew where I was. He couldn’t stand my being right there without access, and even with my husband dragging him away numerous times, he knew the route.

Finally, fed up with my near-away-so-far absence, he sent me a little message. Under the door like a spy he slid his secret sign, a yellow star from his shape-sorter. I saw his little fingers push it hopefully as far as he could through the crack. Would his signal receive a response or would there be radio silence?

Naked, sick, soaking in the tub wishing away the stress, and still I couldn’t resist. I got out and shoved it back under in a different spot. Back and forth it went, me dripping on the floor, my bath steaming behind me, passing a plastic star back and forth with a very happy tot.

I have to admit, I was pretty moved.