Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Dad on a Lark

Every morning when we bring Larkin down from her room, headed for breakfast, we pass a series of objects along the way, and I quiz her on them. Where's the diver? (The poster of an Olympic diver in the upstairs hallway.) Where's the window? (Over the stairway, bright with morning light). Where's the big bird? (A hand-carved eagle my parents bought 50 years ago in Arizona, now hanging on our landing wall.) Where's the light? (The stained glass chandelier.) Where's the fan? (The living room overhead.)

Larkin points to each one and squeals in delight. The diver, the window, the big bird, the light, the fan. Always the same, every day.

I remember, back in college, being struck by a line from Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot: "Habit is the great deadener." I typed that line up in big letters and kept it for years in the various apartments where I toiled away as a beginning fiction writer. To me, a life spent writing seemed like a never-ending adventure, a way to keep making experience strange and new. If habit was the great deadener, then art would be the great enlivener.

Molly's childhood was a lot more emotionally hectic than mine, with divorce and a difficult family reshuffling when she was just 6, and maybe that's why she has always valued rituals and routines. She's quick to sense the comfort a child derives from doing certain things the same way every day. The world is new, strange, and confusing, and an infant needs a handle on it. How else to explain Larkin's joy in the familiar? The diver, the window, the big bird, the light, the fan. It's a way to help her know where she is.

I've come around, too, to these pleasures in our daily life with the Lark. The nicknames we repeat hundreds of times. The clapping on cue (whenever we say, "Clapper!"). The dancing in the living room to the Saturday morning radio polka show. The same books we read over and over, until the lines remain in your head, It's time for bed, little bee, little bee, Yes I love you and you love me! The funny games with Q and A. "Is Larkin a good girl?" we ask. "No!" she says. "Do you love Baby Freaky [her doll]?" "No!" And we laugh, and she laughs.

Every night, even when she isn't particularly dirty, Larkin gets a bath, a splashfest that ends with us wrapping her in a big towel and repeating a sing-songy line Molly dreamed up, "And now ... we turn you ... into ... a baby bur- ri - to!" Then comes our bedtime ritual, which Molly loosely adapted from her all-time favorite children's book, Good Night, Moon. Molly takes Larkin from window to window in our bedroom, and at each window she stops and we talk about what happened today. "This is a day when I played in the park and met two new friends — Goodnight, day!" Then we pull down the blind. "Goodnight day," Molly repeats at the last window, "can't wait for another!"

Doing these things with Larkin has me remembering the rituals in my own family when I was a child. My mother waking us for midnight walks. My father letting me "help" him shine his shoes. The four-note whistle he performed every night when he came up the back porch, announcing he was home. My mother's refrain of "How about doing something for your country?" before announcing a chore. Our bedtime prayer every night of "Now I lay me down to sleep." My grandfather adding a mysterious closing line, "And she lives down in our alley ..." every time we sang the Happy Birthday song. The same ornaments on the Christmas tree, year after year, with the Santa's elf puppet at the very top.

I'm grateful in retrospect for all of this — the comforting sameness of family life, not only creating specific memories, but giving memory itself a shape and center. At 18 months Larkin is still an infant, and no matter how vivid this year and a half has been to Molly and me, she won't remember any of it. But we hope we're building a base for memories later on, ones that will be both rich and useful.

The goal for your child is emotional stability, and you get her there partly by being predictable parents, doling out these familiar experiences every day, the building blocks of a world you are helping her assemble. And so my old philosophical bogeyman — routine — is now my friend and accomplice. Funny, how parenting brings you around.

Life is a medley of continuity and change, and I hope we're setting up a good balance for the Lark. She is so adventurous, even reckless, within her little world. Take her out of it, and she instantly becomes a lot more careful. I enjoy watching her when we go to the park up the street. That look on her face when I take her out of the stroller and she stands at the edge of the playground, surveying the other kids — her expression smiling but watchful, even careful. In these moments I can't help seeing the adult, prefigured right there in the child. A lifetime of school, play and work, confronting new situations with excitement and a touch of wariness.

These are charmed times in our life, full of blessings and discoveries. Good night, day. Can't wait for another.