God has Definitely Tabernacled With Us

I hope everyone who reads this is having a pleasant Thanksgiving of prayer and shared love. I didn’t get our turkey into the oven until about 30 minutes ago. Lots of setbacks. The packer left maybe 300 pinfeathers in it, so I had to pull them out, and when they prepared the bird, they ripped the skin up so there was a lot of sewing to be done when the bones had been removed and it was time for the stuffing.

This will be my son’s first Thanksgiving. Outside of his mom, I mean.

I don’t know how much love he is feeling from me today. I had to get my wife to confine him to the bedroom. Sharp knives. Hot cookware. A waste can full of raw turkey parts and the associated bacteria. A Thanksgiving kitchen is not a good place for a baby who opens every drawer and door he sees, turns over garbage receptacles, and will put anything into his mouth as long as it’s not edible.

He managed to get into the waste can and put turkey bits on the floor. I was busy, so I didn’t know what was going on. We are hoping he didn’t put anything in his mouth. I had to make double sure my wife understood that she could not be on the phone or watching Youtube while I was cooking.

He is a wonderful boy. Most parents will say similar things about their sons, but he really is. He is still extremely cute. We go to Costco once a week, and the ladies who check receipts at the door know him and say they want to take him home. We went on Sunday, and the receipt lady who was working that day expressed her joy because we had brought “the cutie” with us. I said we had also brought my son, but she failed to see the humor.

He makes weird noises all the time. He growls like a monster in a horror movie. He makes a sound that resembles the wind whistling around buildings in the winter. He giggles. He sings, sort of. He can whistle, but he doesn’t do it much. He has joy sounds that are hard to describe.

He hasn’t said anything we can be sure was a word. He vocalizes constantly. He says things that may be words as far as he is concerned.

Today he gave one of his toys what seemed to be a stern lecture, but it was not in English or Nyanja, his mother’s first language. He may think he’s talking already.

When he smiles, he smiles with his whole face.

He is crazy about his mom. He spends a lot of his time lying on her. She sings to him and tosses him around. She talks to him all day.

Although he enjoys using his mother as furniture, he is very independent now, for the most part. He speed-crawls around the house. It sounds like two people running. He leaves the bedroom and goes where he pleases, so we have to make sure everything dangerous or expensive is out of reach.

He is scared of airplanes, so when he hears one, he forgets all about his independence and crawls back to Mom so she can hold him in her arms.

He sometimes cries when people sneeze. We haven’t figured that out yet. On the other hand, he loves watching people drink. He stares with a big grin on his face.

He wakes me up most of the time. A couple of months back, he used his voice. Now he climbs on top of me or comes up behind me and starts pawing and hitting my back with his big, meaty mitts. He’s so strong, sometimes I think it’s my wife.

He likes it when I pound on my back with his fist. When I do it, he opens his mouth and makes long noises so he can hear the effect. “Wuh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh…”

He loves being thrown in the air. He likes being swung around. When he was smaller, my wife thought I would kill him by picking up by one leg and one arm, but he loves it. He hangs there smiling, making incomprehensible happy noises.

He took three steps the other day, and he can push a walker, but he doesn’t seem very interested in walking. Why should he be, when his mother carries him all over the place? He spends a lot of his day standing, but when it comes to locomotion, he flops down on all fours and sticks with the old reliable.

He can reach things now. He pulls things off of other things. Every week, he reaches a little farther. He can’t grab things that are in the middle of my nightstand, but he can pull things off the sides.

My bed has a drawer I use for socks and underwear, and he opens it and throws my stuff out on the floor, one item at a time. He also removes drawer knobs and leaves them in interesting places.

We got him a little plastic activity table with lights and sounds and things to move around. He loves it. He used to sit on the ground and use it, so at first, I didn’t attach the legs that came with it. Then he started standing, so I put them on. He stands over it and works at it very seriously. Today, he picked it up and threw it, and then he was mad because it was upside down.

His curiosity is exhausting. Hold him in your arms, and he stares at the ceiling fans. Put anything down, and he wants to pick it up. He never stops. He zooms around the house like a pinball. I am constantly taking things away from him. I think I say, “Give me that,” more than anything else.

When we open the refrigerator, he makes a shriek of joy and starts speed-crawling for it. We have to close the door before he puts his whole body inside and refuses to move while he gropes things.

He stands up and hugs my thigh when I’m trying to do things, so I have to pick him up. I make the usual dad noises on his skin. I tickle his feet. I show him numbers with my fingers. I whistle at him. We play airplane baby. Sometimes he finds me overwhelming and has to hide his face.

I make sure I play with his toys. He loves that. I put his walker in front of him so he can push it across the room, and when he hits something, I turn it around so he can keep going. I tell him how amazing he is. We use the activity table together. I show him how to put the rings back on the ring toy, but so far, he mainly likes pulling the top of it off. The top is a stuffed rabbit head, and he can’t stand it when it’s on the toy.

He beats his parents. He likes banging on us with his palms, like a guy trying to get a bartender’s attention.

He cut his mother’s lip the other day. Banged it with his head while she was trying to sleep. He has Mongolian blue spots, which are birthmarks that look like bruises, so I hope the police never spot us when his mother has a busted lip and then ask me why he’s bruised up. Mongolian blue spots usually go away with age.

His mother is 100% African, but he looks like he’s mostly Caucasian. His skin isn’t very dark, his hair is curly but not kinky, and his features aren’t strongly African. My genes really bleached him. So much for dominant African DNA.

He may be getting a little spoiled, but we are working on it. Or at least I am. He has a playpen (for our sake as well as his), and he throws a fit when I put him in it. He will stand outside of it and push the sections back and forth, but if I lift him to put him in it, he starts screaming long before his feet touch the ground. My policy is to put him in it once a day and let him yell. He has to learn.

It has been very hard to get him to eat food that isn’t mushy. He is perfectly capable of holding it between his thumb and index finger and putting it in his mouth, but he still prefers mush. On Sunday, he put a little piece of Costco pizza in his mouth and sucked the sauce off, and we were thrilled.

He has no problem drinking. He can drink from a water bottle (not the baby kind) and a cup. The other day, he crawled across our bed, grabbed his sippy cup from my wife’s nightstand, rolled over on his back, and started drinking. He also drinks from a straw.

His eating habits are more my wife’s concern than mine. I know he’s not going to be eating baby food in 2055.

He is advanced for his age. He is bigger than a typical 15-month-old, and he is doing nearly everything ahead of time. We get excited as we see him change. Suddenly, those little bow legs are not so little and not so bowed.

He gets kissed and squeezed all day. He must think this is what life will always be like. If only Earth were like that.

He is a very happy baby. Why shouldn’t he be? His family isn’t dysfunctional. How many kids can say that? I couldn’t when I was young. Most of my friends couldn’t.

Truthfully, I consider our family bizarre in its lack of dysfunction. It’s an extraordinary thing. When I was a kid, every family on our block except one was dysfunctional. My dad’s partners’ families were all dysfunctional. I had 10 aunts and uncles, and only one pair raised a somewhat healthy family.

We pray in front of my son. We do all our Christian stuff in front of him. I put my hand on his head and bless him. I do the same for my wife. He will know supernatural Christianity is normal.

Things are working out well.

Even as a teenager, I wanted marriage, fidelity, and a family. I was not interested in taking down as many women as possible and staying free. Something always went wrong. I went after the wrong women. There were relationships I could not start, and there were relationships that were taken away from my suddenly. I know now that I was cursed. Supernatural enemies did their best to ruin my life and get rid of me. My own efforts didn’t matter. The spirits that hated me were stronger than I was. They always won.

I didn’t understand anything when I was young. I didn’t know how to align with God and defeat the failed spirits that destroy human lives.

I wish I had been raised correctly. I would have grandchildren by now. Life would have been much better. But God is restoring the years the locust ate, and my wife and son are wonderful. Would I trade this beautiful boy for the kids I might have had in my twenties? An unpleasant thought.

We are trying to have a real Thanksgiving today, praying, thanking God, and enjoying each other’s company. It’s not easy, with all the added work of cooking. At least we’re not going to malls so we can save a few dollars on junk for Christmas. I can’t believe people do that on Thanksgiving. I don’t think saving money is a good excuse, except for people in serious financial trouble. Even then, a day of prayer would do them more good than a day at a mall.

I have been so busy, I haven’t even showered. It is time to get up and do that. I hope I’ll be able to do it alone this time. My son loves visiting us in the shower and getting water all over his romper.

I wonder how long it will be till I have to start locking the bathroom door.