Iris

When I arrived home last night — in the fog and pitch black — Orion wanted to ride bikes. So I fixed him up with a set of blinky lights and we rode laps around the cul-de-sac.

That was pretty cool, but it’s not the moment of awwww. This is:

When Iris saw Orion and me putting on our helmets and fixing up for a ride, she pulled her helmet off the shelf and dragged out Orion’s old scoot-bike, which has kind of become “her” bike. She can barely walk, so even the scoot bike is kind of beyond her, but still.

(My kids are three y.o and one y.o.)

I spent a lot of time this weekend alone with Iris. I had wide swaths of such time in Orion’s first two years, because Jenny was at work full time, thus I was the on-call parent for sick days and so forth. I also worked a lot harder to give Jenny breaks from childcare, so I’d have Orion solo for an entire Saturday, for example.

I’m always struck with how different my kids’ personalities are, even at tender ages like 14 months.

Orion was a poor conversationalist for a long time. He didn’t babble much before about 11 months, and then began producing (or approximating the sounds of) words, usually in the form of a demand or question. His babbling was discretely encoded: “brrrrrrnnn” meant “balloon,” and so forth. When he wasn’t trying to communicate something encodable he would just produce incoherent hollering.

Once he mastered a basic vocabulary — around fifty or a hundred words, maybe — it was like a dam broke. He talked — and still talks — pretty much constantly. Often in gibberish or make-believe talk, but always with these en/decodable word units.

Iris began ba-ba-ba-ing at a pretty tender age, perhaps before 6 months. She’s making some clearly encoded words now, like “duh” for “dog” and “aye-n” for “Orion.” But much of her speech is just wordlike noises, rendered with startlingly conversational rhythms. She and I took a loooong walk in the forest Sunday. I would speak to her about any old thing — “look at this pretty ferns, I wonder if we’re lost, oh here’s a slug” and she’d ba-ba-ba with a kind of “oh, really?” or “my yes!” inflection. Or I’d ask her a question and she’d ba-ba-ba with a distinct “yes, please” or “I don’t know” inflection.

She also has a bunch of nonverbal communications. If you offer her something she doesn’t want, she’ll shake her head for example. This is different from Orion, who had acquired a few hand signs — “more,” “all done,” etc. — which Iris has not acquired. Again: her nonverbal “speech” is more organic, less transactional.

(Orion also made a lot of animal and machine noises in lieu of the actual words for the things that produce those noises. He couldn’t say “motorcycle” but “vrrrrm, vrrrrm” did just as good. Iris never makes a noise that doesn’t sound like human speech, AFAICT.)

There may be some kind of Venus/Mars thing here, I dunno. I’m certainly a transactional conversationalist, and Jenny spends a lot of time talking to her friends on the phone in a way that (to me) doesn’t seem to convey much actual information but which is probably more warm and sociable. I’m leery of too much Venus/Mars stuff though, Iris is already way better at throwing and catching than Orion.