Nate, holding an Elmo doll: "Eli, look! Who is this?"
Eli: "Elmuh."
Nate: "Who is this?"
Eli: "Elmuh."
Nate: "Say it one more time and you can have him."
Eli: [blinks]
Nate: "Eli, who is this?"
Eli: "Elmuh!"
Nate: "Right, Eli, very good! Here you go."
Seems my work here is done.
Behold: the Fisher-Price Apptivity Case, a protective baby-friendly cover for your iPhone.
I'm a digital guy, have been since I got an Atari as a second-grader. I now have two kids that can't help but see my TV set, laptop, iPad, iPhone, iPod. They think it's fascinating and fun.
So I did what any responsible parent should do. I downloaded and tested some age-appropriate apps and let my older son explore. The iPad and iPhone are genius devices in their usability, with their clutter-free fascia and immersive interfaces. So now the gadget is teaching the boy animals, colors, shapes, letters, memory retention and matching, spatial relations, you name it. We also set up guidelines: no screens between breakfast and dinner, no YouTube (Thomas the Tank Engine snuff films! who knew?), you have to play out difficult boards and not quit things quickly, etc.
That boy is now 4 and is as digitally savvy as anyone his age. He's also wicked good at memory matching games, he can write his letters in capitals and lowercase, and he plays sophisticated games like Flow, Trainyard and Rush Hour better than many adults. Heck, he figured out how to unlock the home screen at 21 months. And he still loves his real-world toys, crayons and books.
Done right, gadgets are as wondrously useful for young people as they are for adults.
My baby boy is 15 months and dying to play with the iPhone. Right now he only gets glimpses when his big brother is engaged. Soon enough, Eli, soon enough.
I'm having a lot of fun helping Nate learn to speak and watching him communicate. One of his more perplexing pronunciations is "lion," which he learned perfectly, then switched to "liney." So I figured we'd work on it.
"Nate, who's that?" I said, pointing to his gold teddy-bear lion.
"Liney."
"Yes, but it's not liney, that's lion."
"Liney!"
"Nate, can you say lie?"
"Lie."
"Good! And how about yin?"
"Yin."
"Good good! Now say them together. Lie-yin."
"Liney!"
I taught Nathan to say "Yankees" this weekend. ("Yangee!") He recognizes the interlocking NY and gets that we have matching caps. Between this and his Shake Shack dinner, I've hit a new fatherly peak.
Nathan's mother, meanwhile, has him hooked on her chocolate chip cookies. So we have all the important things covered.
Nathan is standing by a coffee table in a Martha's Vineyard rental house playing with a stack of red and black coasters. Dad thinks this is a good time to work on his son's language skills, and picks up a coaster of each color.
"Nathan, this is a red coaster. Can you say red?"
"Raaah."
"Very good! And this is a black coaster. Can you say black?"
[blank stare]
"Okay, so maybe we won't say black."
"Baby!"
"Want to try again? This is the red one. Can you say red?"
"Raaah."
"Right! And this is the black one. Can you say black?"
"Elmo!"
Nathan has figured out how to "answer" the phone, by putting it up to his ear. He does it with the home phone, with our iPhones ... and, um, with the digital camera.
Which, if you think about it, isn't really far off.
My infatuation with the New York Yankees, and by extension Yankee Stadium, dates to my first game in 1978. I was five. My parents brought me--I believe with friends who had a son near my age--and someone (I like to pretend it was Reggie Jackson) hit a foul ball within a row or two of our seats. This being 1978, the stadium wasn't all that full, and my parents encouraged me to chase the ball. I was too shy to do it. But I was amazed that I could be that close to the action, and I came home with a WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS 1977 pennant that hung on my wall for the next 15 years.
I've been a Yankee fan ever since. And I've been to scores of Yankee games, many during the Yankee dynasty of the late 1990s. I've chanted Roll Call from the bleachers, sung "New York, New York" more times than I can count, and even gotten thrown out of a game once.
In recent years, I hadn't been to Yankee Stadium all that much, maybe one or two games a season, as priorities shifted and life intervened. Still, I remained a Yankee fan in full, soaking up multiple articles daily in the New York Times and following every trade, promotion and signing.
I'm a sentimental guy, so the closing of the stadium saddens me. The intentional destruction of such a historic location is a shame. I've had a heavy heart in recent weeks as my beloved Yankees stumbled toward a third-place finish and a quiet end to Yankee Stadium.
But I was surprised by just how much I wanted to be there. To soak up the atmosphere. To look at the scenery. To see the 4 train in the gap in right field. To feel the weight and pride of the Stadium as I did when I was five, and 25, again as a 35-year-old. So I got tickets to a game, once with my family, then again with a friend. But still I needed more.
And so it was that Saturday found me on the 4 train, my son, Nathan, in a carrier on my shoulders, him in a batting-practice onesie, me in my away jersey. My wife, Amy, packed the diaper bag and wore my cap as we headed to Yankee Stadium for one last game. A day game, the last one, on the final weekend of games, for Nathan to see for himself.
Nate was all of 115 days old as of yesterday, and his memories of the day will be slight, at best. But I can tell him we were there, enjoying a Yankee victory on a glorious September afternoon. How we had great seats in the lower level, just to the third-base side of home plate--"I think the best I've ever sat in," said Amy--for a fast-paced 1-0 game, won on a Robinson Cano single in the bottom of the ninth. How we took lots of photos, and strolled close to home plate, and rode the 4 train like true New York fans. And how my little boy enjoyed it all: happily taking in the sights and sounds the first four innings, making new friends everywhere we walked, gamely braving crowds, sleeping on the subway. He even ate lunch at the game, just like Mom and Dad. It was terrific.
And Amy, bless her heart, indulging me and Nathan both, gamely changing his diaper in a stadium ladies' room, feeding him in the mayhem of the ninth inning, lingering long past the final pitch to take pictures and soak up the moment: a more accommodating, loving wife and mother would be hard to find. I've lost track of the number of times I have thanked her this weekend. Yet the joy in my eyes tells her more than I could say.
The outing has made for an extremely emotional weekend. I hadn't fully grasped just how important my Yankee allegiance is to me, or how much I revered the ballpark. Sharing that with my son, however silly it may be at his age, was truly special.
"Someday," I've been telling people, "Nathan is going to thank me for bringing him to the old Yankee Stadium." But that's only part of the story. I owe him my thanks, for being such a good, fun little kid, for making our trip a success, and for being here for me to share with him.
I became a father on May 28, but on Saturday, I became a dad.
One month on on the baby blog. Advance apologies to anyone in front of whom I unexpectedly fall asleep in July.
In related news, Charley has been a model dog with a baby in the house. He is patient, relaxed, curious, respectful, caring. One night last week, Nathan began crying in the bedroom while I was across the apartment, and Charley, noticing the situation, stood on the bed and barked at the bassinet until I investigated. What's that, Lassie? Timmie's in the well and he's broken his leg? Good boy!
Nathan, as previously noted in this space, has his own website. Your host here and over there hopes to update it regularly, maximizing baby love for family and friends (see also) while minimizing "David has posted photos to the Gallery!" emails and a probable invasion of treacly babycentric posts in this space.
In my idealistic little bubble of reality (the same one that thinks if I ask often enough I'll get Amy to play Mario Kart Wii with me one more time and maybe she'll start to like it just a little bit) I'm imagining a bit of a collaborative baby blog. By "a bit of" I mean "more often than never, Nate's mom will battle through her disinterest in blogging and website learning curves and post something to the site." One can dare to dream, no?
My first bright idea was to make Nathan's website a tumblelog for its multimedia support, and to try out a new-to-me blog platform that seemed easy to operate for Amy. My first not-so-bright idea was to try and redirect nathanwertheimer.com to the Tumblr page (an include command would have been so easy...). When the IP shift didn't take properly, Nate's site spent two-plus days offline. Oops. (Side note: as of Tuesday morning, there are still DNS propagation errors, so if you can't see the site, wait a few hours and try again.)
So hardened, I went to Plan B. I've used Movable Type on this page for the past year-plus, and adding a blog to the existing install is cake. But MT 3.2, my previous version, is pretty geeky; no way Amy would touch it. So a favor and a few tinkers later, I have a shiny new MT 4.1 install powering both sites, with a user-friendly interface that even an infant could love.
Next step: content. We have hundreds of photos and numerous videos to get online. I'm debating the pros and cons of my Flickr feed vs. straight posting to the blog. Either way, Nathan will never say, "View my pictures. Enjoy!" in friend spam. At least not without prompting.
Some readers of this space may have heard that my son was being called Fritz for awhile there, and may be surprised to see that he wound up with a name a lot more—well, actually, less intriguing, and may be wondering why.
First, some background. Fritz Louis Jacob Wertheimer was born in Munich in 1912. A German, he was given an appropriately German name. (Actual conversation earlier this week: Amy: "If your great-grandma knew the names Jacob and Louie, why did she go and name your grandfather Fritz?" Me: "Have you considered that in Munich in 1912 Fritz was the hot name of its day?") So much so that the one baby name book I read, which gave paragraph-long perspectives on interesting names, said of the name Fritz, in full, "Still firmly in its lederhosen."
But poking fun of the name shortchanges the man. Fritz emigrated to the United States in 1936 on the cusp of World War II. Details on how much he brought with him are vague—two trunks of clothes; $200; some such—but he made his way first to northeastern Massachusetts, where he lived outside Cape Ann for a time, and where, 70 years later, his sons and grandsons (and soon, his great-grandson) still spend a long weekend every summer.
Fritz ultimately moved to New Jersey, met my grandmother, founded a construction company that my uncle and cousin still run, raised two sons who produced four grandsons, lived through three or four heart attacks, and willed himself to be the picture of health at my bar mitzvah in 1986 before dying 10 months later.
So it's not farfetched to say that Fritz deserved the honor of my son's name in some fashion. And indeed, Nathan's Hebrew name, which is on a religious level equally important, is Peretz, the same as Fritz's. But one doesn't use one's Hebrew name much in 21st-century America, so American Jews typically carry initials forward; for example, my middle name (Ian) is after my other grandfather (Irving).
But—and let's be honest here—it's nigh impossible to find a name that is
Jewish (or secular) in origin;
starting with an F;
appropriately trendy;
and not horrendous when paired with "Wertheimer."
This is a 30-year-old fact, as evidenced by my late grandmother, Frieda, whose honorarium by my parents is my brother's name... of Jeffrey. No offense to those reading this who have F names, but pretend your last name is Wertheimer, you're newly born in 2008, and your parents could have named you, what? Fred? Frank? Felix? Seriously: Felix Wertheimer?
So we decided to bump Fritz to the middle name, and honor Amy's late grandmother Nellie, whom Amy adored, with the first name. That was pretty easy. Nathan is a fine name indeed, strong and moderately popular and with all the right connotations. (I like that David means "beloved," but Nathan is "gift from God," which is just hot.) Plus Nate is a great nickname.
So: Nathan F____ Wertheimer. But. That would make his initials NFW. To which this text-messaging father to be said, nfw.
Less than 48 hours before his birth, my parents unearthed a gem: Fritz had not one but two middle names. (This in comparison to my father and uncle, who have no middle name at all, apparently thanks to my grandmother Dorothy's not wholly inaccurate opinion that Wertheimer was enough of a burden as a name and her boys shouldn't have to deal with any extras.) Epiphanies abounded! Little Nate could share Fritz's middle name. No burden of having the initials NFW or, for that matter, going through life as Fritz.
And here we are, with Nathan Jacob sleeping in the other room, with a name that carries on the memory of good souls on both sides of his family. We've told everyone that we welcome Fritz as a nickname, but so far, he doesn't look much like a Fritz. (Maybe in 60 years or so.) He's a really cute Nate, though.
Let's fall in love, get married, have a baby... we'll call him Nate... if it's a boy
—Prince, "Sign O' the Times"
