The Flip

There is an internet entity called the Baby Center that sends out a weekly email to expectant or recent parents. If you register for the service while your baby is still just a date on the calendar, you get detailed weekly updates on how the belly worm is advancing. "Your Baby at 20 Weeks," reads a typical message, "sleeps between 18 and 22 hours a day, is growing hair on its toes, and moves in response to the sound of your voice." Of course I, in my usual perversity, always found the omissions more interesting than the inclusions. After all, what do these guys know about this kid, in particular, who, in contrast to all the other kids, is not just a rapidly bifurcating cellular mass but, rather, Benjamusco the Magnificent, a dour and opinionated vieux precoz? Do they know that he curses every time pa pulls out the guitar, shudders every time mom eats broccoli, and dreams of algebraic varieties?

Once the child is born, the messages continue. Since Benjamin came a week late, all the post-partum messages seem to come a week early: we were told his umbilical chord should be falling off when in fact it was still fresh; we were wished a happy one-month anniversary when in fact Benny was still a larval three weeks; and so on. The dissonance between the Word and the Flesh was mitigated by the fact that Benjamin always seemed slightly ahead of the curve: he was sleeping through the night long before the Baby Center began spurring us on to hope, and he was singing Baroque arias at a time when the Poster Baby was just beginning to experiment with clucks. So when the message arrived advising us that our child might start flipping over, we were puzzled: for all his talents, Benjamin had never shown the slightest interest in changing position. Perhaps he was too fat too move? Perhaps he had muscular dystrophy, or was born paralytic? The speculative paranoia of the new parent needs very little seed material.

I am pleased to report that the paranoia is vanquished: the child has mastered the flip. Perhaps mastered is too strong: he has 'demonstrated competence' in rolling front to back, under the additional hypotheses that he starts from the praying mantus position, isn't too tired, feels like flipping, is naked, and wants to show off. Catalina gave me the proof this morning: three times, in rapid succession, she set him face down on the ruana, arms pinioned under the body, a captive to his own bodyweight. Then, like an obese salamander in some ancient Mayan harvest ritual, he lifted his fat face to the sky, puffed out his body, and rolled free, capsizing in a slow, graceful roundabout until he was all the way over, the earth firm on the backside, the heavens mercifully fixed, the strain vanished: a huge motionless upside-down amphibian with a smile and a case of the giggles.