Cheeky Little Monkey-Bunny

Since there has been a shortage of Khoo and a surplus of Ler in the Khooler report of late, it seems about time to focus on the shortest member of our family (if Luna stands on her hind legs…) a bit. The Bunny, as she has been known to her father and me since she was born, is slowly, inexorably declaring herself, through her actions and her speech and her understanding, to be less and less of a baby. Of course, she refers to herself as a baby when she sees pictures of herself, and calls all her classmates at school “the babies.” Actually, she is the second oldest in her class, so maybe she’s just being uppity?

Besides being terribly good at walking and running, showing us that she is able to climb up onto the coffee table and couch, saying all manner of interesting words (watermelon, egg, elbow, knee, animal), and dancing, our bunny is becoming, to quote her raised-in-a-former-British-colony father, quite cheeky. She is no longer just along for the ride. When I pick her up, she dissolves all the joints in her body so that she can slide back to the floor. When I tell her it’s time to get dressed for school, she laughs and runs away. She asks for things that have occurred to her entirely on her own, like a particular food, or even, this weekend, a bath. Who are you all of a sudden?

This morning, the bunny did something entirely new, and her dad and I are still talking about it. We were reading a weird but sweet little book we got from the library, called Little Fur Family (by Margaret Wise Brown, and illustrated by the excellent Garth Williams, whose drawings you may remember from the Little House books and the truly awesome The Cricket in Times Square). In the book, a little fur child gets up, goes out to play, gets home, and gets put to bed by his loving fur parents, who hold his paw and sing him a song. I improvised the tune of the song, and Naomi wanted me to sing it over and over. I sang it about three times before I noticed that her voice, saying “more, more” sounded a little strange. When I checked her face, her little lower lip was quivering, and her eyes were filling with tears. This picture, of the fur family putting their fur child to bed, holding his paw, and singing to him, had apparently moved her to tears. Because for sure it was not my singing.

Yes, this anecdote has a high sap factor. But it is killing me, not because it’s so cute, although, geez, it really is, but because it is a glaring bright reminder that every time this little girl wakes up with an additional major synapse all myelinated, she is going to be a different person than she was the day before. And we will have to be as well. We will have to go from being cheerful parents who willingly and easily meet the needs of a fairly predictable little emotional robot, to hopefully being cheerful parents who go on trying to meet those needs while facing the fact that their little robot is becoming a person with FEELINGS. Not just reactions, real feelings. It’s hard to articulate why this feels like my parental responsibilities have just quadrupled.