First Year Toy Review, Part I

My husband Andrew has a great mindset that he has shared with me about making purchases: When you buy something, think about the day you will one day have to dispose of it. Children are not babies for very long, though it may seem like it at the time. Because I am keen on helping my family save money, I try to purchase toys with high standards of quality that will last a long while. Because my son is Herculean, I try to ensure that all of his toys are built to withstand something akin to a nuclear blast. And because I recognize that children are in a continual state of development, I try to find toys that will grow and develop with Jackson, rather than be discarded as "too young" before the purchase price of the toy has been validated.

The toys I am highlighting today are ones that I bought for my son when he was 5 or 6 months old. He is now 27 months old, but we still find time to play with some of them. What I like about each of these toys in particular is that they have many developmental stages of play for a child.

Fisher-Price Rock-A-Stack

Price: $10

Size: Small/Medium

Age: 5 months+

Durability: Medium-High

Pros: The simplicity of this toy is what makes it great for babies. They can actually hold the individual rings; they can chew on the support stand; it's "rockable" so it doesn't tip over too easily when an uncoordinated tot bumps it accidentally. They also have modified the top ring so that instead of being strictly a hollow, red donut, it functions as a semi-clear, semi-opaque red rattle.

Cons: The tower of the stack can fit into a child's mouth up to a point. If you have a child with a particular large mouth, she may be able to hit her gag reflex, though I haven't yet seen this become a problem. The tower and stack can be used as a hammer, so your little Bam-Bam may reek havoc on your toes as you walk past.

Educational Value: Standard colors make it easy to identify color names to your child. Helps teach order of operations for stacking, since the base is wider than the top and limits how the rings can be stacked. Helps develop fine motor skills for placing the rings on the stack.

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Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics, Baby's First Blocks

Price: $13

Size: Small/Medium

Age: 5 months+

Durability: High

Pros: There are numerous parts to this, but not so many that a parent can't keep track of them. The toy is a container and is designed to help children put the blocks through the right shape hole. Who doesn't love a toy that encourages kids to be neat? The blocks themselves are very durable and are well-designed to avoid injury: All edges are smooth; the pieces are VERY well structured so that babies can chew on them and slobber on them and not bust them, plus they can hit them on anything without making even a dent. While each shape is hollow, there is a vent hole in the center to prevent the child from accidentally gaining suction and getting the toy stuck on any body part. The pieces all fit easily within the container, which has a convenient carrying handle. The yellow lid is a great attractant (and may be the only part the child wants to play with for a long time), too!

Cons: This is really nit-picky, I know, but one of the shapes is really hard to name. When I play with my son, I like to be able to identify the shape, color, texture, etc. The triangle, star, circle, and square are fairly simple. But the fifth shape could be called a plus, an X, a cross, or whatever other name you might imagine for that shape. Ideally speaking, anyone who plays with this toy with your child will be in agreement as to what shape-name to associate to that piece.

Educational Value: This toy is great for helping a baby learn basic colors and shapes. Each shape will only fit into its own shape hole in one particular orientation, so there's no cheating there. Believe it or not, it's a tough concept for a baby to learn that convex and concave shapes can match one another. (Think about it: you wouldn't give a 4-month-old a puzzle.) Each shape comes with a matching piece that is the same shape and color, so you could help teach matching skills as well. The hole in the middle of each shape matches the exterior shape (e.g. the star shape has a star hole) to help parents and caregivers guide children to learn how to sort shapes.

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Fisher-Price Stack & Roll Cups

Price: $10

Size: Small

Age: 4 months+

Durability: Very high

Pros: This is the most cleverly constructed simple toy I have ever encountered. The Stack & Roll Cups have been a favorite not just with my son and his compatriots in babyhood but also with parents. They are that awesome. Like the old school stacking cups (which I also recommend but am not profiling today), these can stack on top of one another into a tower. They also nest well within one another. But what the normal stacking cups can't do, but these can is to join together to make balls. Each cup has a hole in the end that is about an inch in diameter, and the smaller ones have extra ventilation holes, "just in case". There are 10 cups in all, which can make 5 balls simultaneously, but each "cup" can form a ball with both the next cup larger and the next cup lower. AND you can stack any smaller cup on the back of any larger cup. As if that weren't enough, they included another little ball with a smiley face and a jingle bell inside. (For a while, it seemed like the jingle ball was enough for Jackson and friends while us parents and other adults played with the cups. They really are fun!) Kids can smack them around, fit them together, stack them, and roll them around as balls or even bring them in the bathtub. The favorite, of course, is to stick the jingle ball inside a ball made from the cups and set your child loose chasing it, fingering the ball inside, and shaking it around. WAIT! There's more! I've saved the best for last! Not only can your runt gnaw on these things (and get great little cup-shaped red marks on her face), but they store up really compactly. Because of the way the jingle ball fits into any of the cup-balls, and the way that any cup can form a ball with the next larger and next small size, you can make one big nested ball out of all the pieces. This whole set can be stored neatly together in an area the size of the two largest cups forming a ball.

Cons: The sophistication of the toy is lost on babies. Also, because there are 10 cups, the manufacturers had to use more than the standard set of readily name-able colors, so there can be some awkward moments as you try to encourage your baby to chase down the "ummm...yellow-green cup".

Educational Value: Each of the standard rainbow colors is represented in a cup, plus a couple of extras to show that not all color names are so clearcut. The colors are also ranked in size by rainbow order with the smallest cups being in the purple portion of the spectrum and the largest being red. The cups have numbers on them, as well, concatenating the order in which the cups will stack as a whole. (Of course you could also make a stack with all evens and another with all odds. Or you could nest the evens and nest the odds. Or....) When you make the cups into the 5 simultaneous balls, other patterns are apparent: each in the pair of cups forming it has the same shape (e.g. a star) engraved in a ring on it; each in the pair are of the same or nearest color name (though the red and orange ball gets a bit awkward to explain). There are soooo many educational opportunities with this toy that even through much of elementary school it can be a useful demonstrative tool.

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That's all for today, folks. I've got lots more to review, but I'm tired. I promise they are not all Fisher-Price toys! It just so happens that Fisher-Price has some high quality toys for children for the first year. Playskool and other brands dominated the ranks for many of our toys for the second year, which I'll get around to profiling when I finish up with first year toys. Stay tuned for more baby toy fun!

Toy Review: Toys for the First Year

Many parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, friends, and guilty-conscience acquaintances want to buy toys for children but have NO IDEA what to get them. At some point, we've all been that person shopping for the kid whom we rarely see and have little to no idea what she'd want for a toy. When the child is a baby, finding the "right toy" can seem even less clear-cut for some people. So, what I've decided the world (heh, I flatter myself) needs is some idea of what to get for children of different ages, based on my experience with my own son and other children in his general age group.

When you plan to purchase a toy for a child, the first consideration needs to be: is the parent going to be happy with this toy? Maybe the toy is a gigantic Tonka truck for your newborn (yes, my MOM did that to me); maybe it's a robotic dinosaur that roars (and terrifies your 2-year-old). In these situations, the toys are not unwanted in and of themselves, but they are really age-inappropriate.

Of course, the gift might be something that is categorized as being for a child's first year and have so many bells and whistles that it annoys the crud out of anyone who is sane enough to like a bit of quiet (including the child). Maybe it's visually overstimulating to the point where your child just avoids it (like this Discovery Elephant from Infantino).

Other considerations are the child's capability to play with the toy and what the child is likely to do with it. Most babies can't even hold things with their hands for about the first 3 months, so anything they use for entertainment before that has to be automatic or parent-controlled. Also, for the first year and often beyond, pretty much anything the child holds has the same destination: the mouth. If you suspect lead paint, barium paint, small parts, sharp edges, easily broken bits, or any other method by which a child could get hurt by breaking something or putting it in his mouth (such as choking!), then DO NOT give it to a child who hasn't reached the 12 month mark yet. Ideally speaking, a child under age 3 years should have NO ACCESS to anything that is dangerous, including pen caps, loose change, Legos, and Barbie shoes.

Also, believe it or not, expensive does not mean good. Yes, generally speaking, higher quality children's products do have a higher price. However, just because you spend $80 on a rocking giraffe, do not expect that the child will necessarily get $80 worth of enjoyment out of it.

When it comes to toys for the first year, simple is ideal. Most children under 12 months are happy most of the time with a half-crumpled water bottle to squeeze and chew. Aim for that mentality. In fact, for the first year there is very little need for toys at all except as a distraction technique. Babies will play with whatever surrounds them in their environment. Give a baby a solid wood drink coaster with concentric grooves in it, and she will chew on it, bang it on furniture, and touch its various textures. To give a child this age a toy that plays 50 digital songs and "teaches" a foreign language that the parents do not speak is overkill--and runs a serious risk of overstimulation.

Overstimulation is the technical term to describe a lot of seemingly different behaviors in young children. An overstimulated child will tend to be crankier and more withdrawn. If a child experiences too much overstimulation (such as excessive television and movies and video games), she will eventually come to expect the world to entertain her instead of finding her own entertainment. A baby is seldom troubled with the feeling of boredom. Everything in life is new and exciting (like that electrical outlet you forgot was under that table and that fork that went missing recently), and the most interesting things to a baby are those that help the child learn about the world she has joined.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has some great guidelines for parents on age-appropriate toys and activities:

One- to Three-Month-Old

• Images or books with high-contrast patterns
• Bright, varied mobile
• Unbreakable mirror attached to inside of crib
• Rattles
• Singing to your baby
• Playing varied music from music boxes, CDs, records, or tapes (and I'll add in mp3s here)

Four- to Seven-Month Old

• Unbreakable mirror attached to inside of crib or playpen
• Soft balls, including some that make soft, pleasant sounds
• Textured toys that make sounds
• Toys that have fingerholds
• Musical toys, such as bells, maracas, tambourines (Make sure none of the parts can become loose.)
• See-through rattles that show the pieces making the noise
• Old magazines with bright pictures for you to show her
• Baby books with board, cloth, or vinyl pages

Eight- To Twelve-Month-Old

• Stacking toys in different sizes, shapes, colors
• Cups, pails, and other unbreakable containers
• Unbreakable mirrors of various sizes
• Bath toys that float, squirt, or hold water
• Large building blocks
• "Busy boxes" that push, open, squeak, and move
• Squeeze toys
• Large dolls and puppets
• Cars, trucks, and other vehicle toys made of flexible plastic, with no sharp edges or removable parts
• Balls of all sizes (but not small enough to fit in the mouth)
• Cardboard books with large pictures
• CDs, tapes, music boxes, and musical toys
• Push-pull toys
• Toy telephones
• Paper tubes, empty boxes, old magazines, egg cartons, empty plastic soda/juice/milk bottles (well rinsed)

[All the above bulleted data was pulled directly from Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5, Revised Edition (link goes to 5th Edition, newer than my copy) which is a publication put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics. This book can be obtained free of its $20 price tag by joining the Publix Baby Club, which sends you a free copy just for joining.]

You'll notice that nowhere in all of that was a recommendation that you overload a child with glamorous, flashy toys. Many people have remarked that if you give a child a toy, he will spend a greater amount of time playing with the box it came in. Save yourself the money and just give the kid the box!

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll highlight some toys that have proven to be good all-around buys. I am not affiliated in any way with toy manufacturers or distributors, so I'm completely unbiased (and unfunded, heh). All toys that I will include for recommendations for the first year are durable and will easily tolerate a slobbery, strong, teething baby and "survive" with barely any signs of wear.

Stay-at-home parenting, Part 2

Many people wonder: what do "stay-at-home" parents DO all day? (Some people also like to refer to the practice as "work-at-home" parents, which is excessively vague and confusing, methinks.) For one, I'm rarely home! About 3 or 4 mornings a week, Jackson visits the gym's Kid's Club while I get my exercise or physical therapy time. In the early days when I started taking him to the gym, I would just relax in the hot tub and try to melt away the pain and stress of never having down time. I progressed over time to where I was regularly attending Zumba class and then added in more weight-bearing exercise. Jackson, unawares, merely enjoys time with children in a variety of age groups.

We go to parks a great deal and explore the variety of playgrounds and parks available here in Gainesville, FL. We visit other families with young children and have playdates. On days when we'd rather not be outside, we go to the play area at the local shopping mall or the natural history museum, which has free admission and is well-geared toward children. We have picnics together for our lunches after the gym, sometimes joined by friends. He has also just started a new gymnastics class and has regularly attended a weekly open-play event at a local play-place for kids. (http://www.suncountrygymnastics.com/) We have regularly attended as a fun activity for a Friday morning that gets us around other parents and young children as well as exercise in an environment where Jackson can fairly safely play however he likes.

Jackson is also learning the basics of household management. He likes to pretend to vacuum and has learned most of the ins and outs of vacuum usage, though so far he's too scared to operate it himself. He loves to sweep with brooms and dustpans. He loves to pretend to cook at his kitchenette, custom-built by my step-dad. (Ric is available to build and ship custom-made all-wood kitchenettes and toys: reraddas (at) gmail (dot) com; the man is an awesomely talented journeyman carpenter!)

Jackson knows a good bit of geography, too, so he can often tell me how to get where he wants around town on the days when it's not too pressing that I go where I intend. He likes to walk around the mall, feed the ducks at the pond by the hospital, play with the display toys at Toys R us and Target, and will point out (and demand to visit) when we are passing the home of a good friend of his. Because so much of his life is decided for him, I try to allow him a certain amount of autonomous decision-making. But of course, there are boundaries in all things: we do not go to the playground if it is time for lunch or too close to naptime. We do not watch a movie while after he has his bath and is calming down for bedtime.

At this point, our day is well-regimented. We wake each weekday morning, eat breakfast, and go somewhere by 9 or 9:30. Typically around 10:45 or 11 we're starting our lunch. Afterward, we have some low-key play, brush teeth together, read a story, and Jackson naps at around noon. When the world isn't conspiring against us, 2.5 to 3 hours later Jackson comes out of his room with a big smile and tackles me with a hug and a kiss and tells me he loves me. We spend a little time playing or cuddling while he adjusts to being awake again, then we have a snack. Afterward we typically either go outside to play or run errands or both, if time allows. Andrew gets off work around 5:30pm or 6:pm most days, so we do dinner then as a family. Jackson usually finishes eating first, excuses himself from the table with an "All done!" and plays independently while Andrew tells me in a burst of excitement all about his day. The two of them then go do bath time while I clean up the dishes. Shortly after I finish, Jackson comes tearing out of the bathroom, naked but for his lion towel (which makes him feel like a king). We try to wrangle him into a diaper and some pajamas before he gives us reason to use our Bissell Spot Bot. He gets a little more quiet play time, then we brush teeth and floss as a family. Andrew reads him what seems an interminable number of books while I listen through the baby monitor, then Jackson goes to bed. There's very little different on the weekends, especially since Andrew is still finishing up some college courses to prepare for graduate school.

I'm planning some more posts in the future that will talk about some of the toys and games that we highly recommend, so stay tuned!

Stay-at-home parenting, Part 1

One of the great opportunities afforded me in this life is the chance to spend time in my child's earliest and formative years focused on helping develop his potential as a human being. Many people refer to this as being a stay-at-home parent. Some very wrongly assume that it's only women who fill this role (and are just flat out wrong; women merely dominant the group is all).

In ancient times, before we had running water and electricity and other things that we believe simplify our daily lives, tasks needed to be divided in order to keep our social groups alive and well. Because men are sadly not endowed with the capacity to provide nourishment to babies, women naturally filled the role as caregivers of babies and children. Men went off and did the other fiddling bits such as chasing down food and trying to sort out what makes good plants for eating grow. Somewhere along the line, women got stuck doing the cooking and the cleaning, since clearly they had so much time on their hands, sitting around trying to keep the children from maiming themselves. Then the Industrial Revolution changed things, as people became more interested and more capable of finding ways to make a job simpler and more automated. Suddenly clothes did not all need to be hand-washed. Electric sewing machines replaced the vast amount of time women spent with needle and thread in hand. And over time, more appliances came into being that were designed to lessen the work a woman had to do at home. Even baby formula was created, allowing many women complete freedom from their prior role as a housebound person.

Suddenly even women who previously would not have been financially well-off enough to avoid doing their own chores had time to follow many of their aspirations and indulge in the frolicking larks that many men enjoyed. They demonstrated that they were equally capable (or in some capacities, superior) to men in the workforce. And many of them liked it so much, they stayed there and encouraged other women to follow their lead.

One day, however, things had gone beyond the point of no return. Women were no longer really in a position to choose whether or not they wanted to work outside the home. To afford the rising cost of living (induced in part by the doubling of the workforce), women now formed a staple portion of the workforce market. Instead of being locked in a cage at home, they became locked in a cage at work. (To read more about this, I highly suggest this excellent work by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Parents are Going Broke.)

So, it's no great surprise that I grew up under the impression that women and men who "stayed at home" were lazy or insufficient contributors to their families. My own mother had a great deal to do with me developing this impression. She's a hardcore work-a-holic, checking in on work email regularly throughout the day even when on paid vacations. My father was also working, but for many years he ran his business out of the house. Being that his income varied seasonally, mom was the primary breadwinner for our household. She was a great role model, and my sister has followed in her tracks as much as possible--even to the point where she works at the same company which has claimed my mother for over 30 years.

Didn't he know that children are best raised in herds of their peers by total strangers?

My brother-out-of-law stayed home with the kids for several years. They were not a rich family by any means, so mentally I judged him negatively for not working full time and putting the kids in preschool to give them more "social interaction." Didn't he know that children are best raised in herds of their peers by total strangers? While he could have done more to help them socially in the early years, I've come to realize that he was taking on a far more challenging task than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

Our society is not set up for families to have daytime custody of their own children. As bizarre as this sounds, it's demonstrably true.

When I finally gave up the dream that I could work from home 20 hours a week and still watch my newborn, I felt like a failure. But I was nursing 12 hours a day, sleeping about 4 or 5, and the other time I spent trying not to be a complete and disgusting slob. Living in a college town, I have found many other parents like Andrew and myself who have no family or social support system in place to help us care for our child. Having been physically "disabled" from a car accident a few months before my surprise pregnancy, working for any duration is very painful, so a full time job is out of the question until I can find a way to stop hurting all the time. Working part time doesn't cover enough to make up the costs of outsourced childcare. So, all things considered, it's been the most ideal option for us for me to stay home with Jackson and drag him to nearly all my medical appointments. (Thankfully my physical therapy sessions are at my gym, so I can pawn him off on the gym's lovely day care girls while I get abused back into feeling human again.)

Many moms I know would have loved to spend more time at home with their children, but by the time they were considering getting pregnant with a second child, they needed to go back to work to make more money for the family in order to pay the bills. Jackson's first playgroup, formed in his first months of life, has been decimated by this effect. All but one of his friends from the original dozen members is now in the care of someone other than Mom or Dad during the day while both parents work. These children who enjoyed special time throughout the day with their mothers (as we all were) have been shunted into a classroom directed by a stranger whose attention is divided among many children with the same abilities and disabilities. Luckily, society has managed to convince these parents that this is the normal order of things, that it's somehow more natural for a child to be kept away from her family all day while surrounded by those who know almost nothing more about the world than herself.

Don't get me wrong: childcare availability outside the home is a great feature of modern society. My son regularly spends time playing in the daycare at my gym while I exercise. There are many single parents in this world who do not have the luxury of staying with their children all day. There are very good benefits to a preschool, such as the ability to teach children a foreign language or let them play with toys and materials that are not likely to be found in a traditional home setting. But I do not believe for a moment that foisting my child off into the world before he can fully communicate is really the natural modus operandi.

I believe in equality. I believe that men should be allowed to stay home with children just as well as women should. I believe that women should be allowed to work just as well as men should. But I will not suggest that a parent is doing a disservice to a child by spending quality time focused on the child himself. The emotional well-being of a family should not be sacrificed because of the selfishness or pig-headed ideology of any one of its members.

I stay at home for my health. I stay at home to focus on my child. I stay at home because my husband is overwhelmed with work and school and has very little free time--that I'd prefer was spent with us as a family, not doing chores. I stay at home because I enjoy the physical and emotional freedom. We don't spend much time at home, but I'm happy and proud to be a Stay at Home Parent.

Oh, wow, he IS big for his age!

If I had a penny for every time I'd heard people exclaim over how large Jackson is, I would have his college savings taken care of by now.

It started when he was born. My midwife had been in doubt that Jackson would be much more than 8 and a half pounds. I insisted otherwise. A few days before birth he was projected to be 9lbs. And then when he arrived (Thank you, Mr. Stork!), it turned out that I had been carrying a watermelon of a child when he weighed in at 9lbs, 15oz.--an ounce shy of 10lbs! For those of you on the metric scale, that's 4.5kg.

He only lost 2 ounces over our time in hospital post partem, and had regained 5 ounces by 2 days later. By 2 weeks old, Jackson weighed in at 12lbs. At 2 months, he was 14lbs. When he was just about 5 months old, we found ourselves scrambling to find a larger car safety seat because he had nearly hit the maximum of 22lbs for his infant car seat. (The legal requirement in Florida for turning a child's car seat so that it faces forward instead of backward is that they child must be a year old and at least 20lbs. We had to wait more than half a year to complete the first requirement after the second was reached.)

Clothing-wise, this translated into him outgrowing 0-3 months apparel by 3 weeks old. A few weeks later, 3-6 months clothing was also too small. He managed to last until about age 7months in his 6-12 months clothing. And then things slowed down somewhat. He was in 18 months clothing until after his first birthday. He spent several months in 24 months accoutrements and then a stint in 2T. Around 20 months of age, we began gradually upsizing his wardrobe to incorporate 3T clothing, which are now the only ones to fit--and some are getting small now that he's hit his second birthday. (This is in part due to the fact that he's still in diapers, whereas it's assumed by clothing manufacturers that no room needs to be left in a 3 year old's apparel for anything more substantial than briefs.)

Jackson was also an early walker. We had never bothered to put anything other than socks on his feet until Andrew and I judged that Jackson was competent enough to try his skills outside. His first pair of shoes were Robeez for children up to 18 months. He was 10 months old. Shortly after his second birthday a few weeks ago, I took him shoe shopping (as I've done about every 2 months for over a year now), and he was sized into 10.5 shoes. He now wears the same size shoes as many 3 and 4 year old children.

Around 20 months old, we also found that (yet again) we were going to need to put Jackson into the next size higher diaper. He was then moved up to a size 6--the largest size available at the regular store for baby diapers that are not training pants. Now that he is 25 months, even those are getting small.

As you can imagine, having a larger than average child can be dramatically more expensive in the early years than a more petite child. He has not been able to wear most of his clothing into oblivion along the way, and his shoes barely show any signs of use by the time he outgrows them. Diapers are progressively fewer in number in the box with each size increase (at the same price), which means that we spend more money on diapers than others with smaller children.

And yet for all that, my son is not fat. I've always felt a little defensive about the accusation of his being fat, I suppose. The fact of the matter is that Jackson is in the 97th percentile for both height and weight (EDIT: Since I originally wrote this post, he has elevated to the 100th percentile for weight; can't get accurate height measurement myself, so that is unknown but still at least 97th percentile). This means that he is taller and heavier than 97 percent of children his age. To me, this also means that he is proportionate. A child who is 50th percentile for height and 97th percentile for weight is certainly worthy of being accused of packing on the pounds. Yet, a child who is 50th percentile for both height and weight would be proportionate. The same is true of my son. Only rather than being built like a waif, he's built more like a gladiator.

From hour 1 in the hospital, we knew he was a strong child. I had my suspicions about what he was getting up to in utero (to the point where I started wondering if my midwife hadn't missed a second child in the making), which were confirmed when he came out with excellent muscle tone and already lifting his own head. By the time he had perfected his ability to grasp objects at a few months old, he was able to inflict some serious injuries to us. His hands could really pinch hard--and he proved it every time he nursed for a while, screaming like a bansidhe if I tried to stop him from injuring me.

His perfect posture as a new sitter confirmed his amazing back strength, which was surprising since he was swaddled for nearly every sleep instance for the first 7 months. (Just TRY to imagine tightly swaddling a 23lb baby. Just try!) He was pulling himself to standing by the end of his 7th month, and a few days before he turned 10 months, he was walking unassisted. Does this sound like a butterball?

When Jackson was at an older friend's birthday party, he was 22 months old while the others were almost all over age 3. He was able to hang suspended by his arms for 15 seconds or more (and then had to be pried down to the ground) while his size-mates who were at least a year older could only manage to hang for a second or two before falling. He also loves to be placed near the top of a pole to slide down in a slow, controlled manner.

Yet for all that my son is practically an Olympian athlete for his age, his chubby baby cheeks have always seemed to give others the impression that he is fat. He never has been excessively fatty for his age. Despite that he's entirely made of thick, lean muscle, a Salvation Army worker collecting donations at the mall still had the gall to sweetly call him "Fatty". That's right. She called him Fatty, like he was some adorable little ball of flab. I was so irritated by this, though I didn't say anything to the inane woman herself. Never mind that he was not the least bit overly fleshy anywhere but the cheeks of his face; never mind that he had just been running around the mall with me, getting all sorts of exercise and climbing and jumping like a wild man at the children's play area. She was determined to judge him as being a fat older child, rather than recognizing him as the chubby cheeked baby that he really is.

I wish I could say she is the only one to misjudge him, but I know it's not true. With his height, Jackson is often judged to be older than he really is. Preschool age children believe him to be a peer of theirs, then get very confused when he speaks like a child who is just learning how to express himself. He follows them around like a happy, oblivious little puppy because he wants so badly to try to make friends. They feel uncomfortable by the disparity between his size and behaviors and often estrange him or berate him for acting so bizarrely.

Even older people who know his age are still confused by him on occasion because it is so easy to forget that he's as young as he is. Often I find him held to a higher level of judgment, intentionally or otherwise, because people expect him to behave like a 3 or 4 year old. Strangers give him looks that clearly show they think his behavior to be wildly inappropriate.

As a result, Andrew and I have developed a habit of outright mentioning his age at every opportunity. We emphasize how tall and strong he is for his age, how accomplished he is for someone so young. We're quite proud of how smart, healthy, beautiful, strong, tall, and socially knowledgeable Jackson is--and feel pained when he is misjudged by others.

By now you may be wondering why I am writing all this. Am I just venting? Am I complaining? Do I have some idea in mind that will fix this? Well, it's actually all three, to be honest. So, now that you've endured my venting and complaining, consider some of these thoughts that I've had as the mother of my mammoth-baby.

One thought I have had is that there ought to be a Big & Tall for babies and toddlers. If one brand were out there making clothing for all the kids who are above the 75th percentile in size, that company could make a lot of parents and their children some very happy customers. I can hear you now: "Why can't bigger kids just wear a large size?" The thing is, kids (like adults) come in all different shapes and sizes. Some children are long and lean. Some are squat and wide. And some have crazy beefcake arms that don't fit the sleeves of shirts that are otherwise the right size. Perhaps no specific Big & Tall line needs to come together as a result of this problem, but our societal expectations are very clearly demonstrated when it's impossible to find pants for a larger than average toddler that don't assume he's a prodigy in toilet training. Other dimensional assumptions are evident as well. By the time Jackson gets to where the waistband is too snug on his pants, he is only just fitting the legs. He's got stubby little baby legs compared to his wide hips, so no matter what stage he's achieved in a set of clothes, he looks goofy. Unless I start sewing all the clothing for my kid, he's going to be stuck in a continuous cycle of looking and feeling exceedingly awkward until he reaches adult clothing sizes.

Another reason I am writing this is because I want to make people aware of larger children. They exist. I married a giant of a man at 6'2" with some broad shoulders and hips that would make him look like Atlas if he deigned to visit the gym. While I may have lost all 50lbs of baby weight, I'm still no tiny slip of a girl at 5'8". Clearly our offspring are not likely to be described as tiny. I've known other children like Jackson, whose parents' combined features resulted in a standard-obliterating child of god-like proportions. The moms and dads of these children all show the same symptoms as Andrew and me, including the defensiveness of the darling little one's age and size.

One mom I know with a son in the 100th percentile (that's right, he's off the charts because he's so tall) and a daughter who is also above average in size, said that she often finds herself asking how old other children are so that the parents will ask the ages of her children. Both her spawn are well above average intelligence, so they are (again, like Jackson) that much more confusing for people's brains to classify. As an example: Jackson and this boy, Dane, were playing together. Dane was 2 and a half; Jackson was 19 months. Dane was frustrated by Jackson's presence and wanted to keep him from playing with certain toys. He fought with him and was angry about having to share, so he was repeatedly getting put into time out. After the third or fourth time he was sent to time out, he climbed up onto his dad's lap and whispered into his ear: "Dane needs to share with all people alike." His verbal skills were sufficient to express this idea that he knew was the truth (though he did refer to himself in the 3rd person). Yet because he really was only 2 and a half, his emotional development and self-restraint were still developing at a reasonable level for his age.

We live in a judgmental society. People naturally have a tendency to try and classify what they see. It's one of the ways in which we file away information we receive from our senses. What I ask is that rather than making a superficial judgment based on the size of a child, the world at large should consider other factors. Far more telling than height is a child's physical development. Does she have teeth? Can she sit unsupported? How skilled is she at walking? Climbing? Running? Jumping? What are her inclinations when surrounded by other children? The answers to these questions help develop a much better picture of the age of a youngster than by an assessment of the distance from head to toes.