baby wayne

Hello dear readers. We are all very excited to report that Otis has made some small steps towards independent eating since our last entry. Otis has expanded his repertoire and is now enthusiastically licking nutella, cheese spread, pear, dates and vegemite on toast.

Of course he is yet to properly ingest any of these foods, beyond the miniscule amounts that get on his tongue. Mammalian evolution wouldn’t have progressed very far if our ancestors were merely equipped to lick those foods they hunted and gathered, but Otis may yet be the first baby to prove that it is possible to survive on spreads alone. We know that something is going in by the changes in what is coming out the other end.

On reading the above list of foods you have probably baulked, as I do every day when I offer him these things, but be assured that we have tried many tricks to get something with actual nutrients into him. Having spent so long avoiding foods, Otis is very skilled at spotting them long range; even those pureed vegetables cleverly hidden under cheese spread don’t make it past his super honed senses. If it helps, our paediatrician informs us that babies need fats for their brain development. Not sure where the sugar and preservatives fit in though.

We are hopeful that this new foray into ingestion will mean that actual eating is not too far away. Otis is definitely more interested and more insistent about the food that we are eating although his attempts to feed us whole unpeeled mandarins are not always desirable.

Otis recently underwent a fairly traumatic blood test to determine his iron levels which are, amazingly, ok. He is still to put on any weight over the last four months, so we hope that this beginning will see him a little bigger and a little heavier.

A number of people have commented to me how strange it is, that two people who love to cook, and eat food could be the parents of a person who goes to great lengths to avoid it. I concluded a little while ago that Otis’ aversion to food is my karma, punishment for once scoffing under my breath at a mother who was feeding her children hot chips and coke at the football. Now of course I would be over the moon if Otis were to eat hot chips and coke. Perhaps this is the grand lesson of parenting; you make all kinds of plans and have all kinds of ideas about how things will be, only to have them turned on their head by a little person who most definitely has his own ideas about how things will be. Of course, we won’t be letting Otis survive solely on spreads once he is actually chewing, but it will do for now.

I recently spotted this in the New Yorker.

“A crafty coyote…led the law on a two-day chase through Central Park before he was brought down yesterday by a sharp shooter with a tranquilizer gun…The coyote [was] nicknamed Hal because he was spotted near the Hallett Nature Sanctuary… “This is New York, and I would suggest that the coyote may have had more problems than the rest of us,” Mayor Bloomberg said. The News, March 23rd.

Nobody knows how Hal got into Central Park. But he wasn’t the first. A coyote was found there in 1999…Otis, the coyote captured in Central Park in 1999, was brought to the Queens Zoo where he still lives. The News, March 24th.”

And this, from Otis the coyote himself.

“In Queens I really have quite a free schedule, between feedings, and pacing back and forth, which I don’t really have to do but I do it anyway, because the little kids seem to enjoy it, and I feel it is expected of me. One so-called biographical fact I will mention, just because I find it so damn aggravating, is that before I was here I did not have a name – not Otis, not anything – and I wish I didn’t have one now. It’s really not coyote-like. To have a name at all, that is, let alone Otis. I guess you’d probably have to be a coyote to know what I mean.”

It got me thinking about how our baby Wayne came to be our baby Otis.

We found choosing a name the hardest thing in the lead up to having a baby. We had a number of loose criteria. Something unusual, but not so unusual as to invite school yard taunting. Not John, or Nicholas, but not Eldrich or Afternoon or Kool. Something without unintended Hollywood associations. Something that sounded ok with my surname, so not Torrence, or Laurie. Something our families could be ok with.

We arrived at the hospital with a shortlist – 5 girls names and 5 boys names. People told me that once he was born, he would look like a particular name, or there would be one on our list that seemed to suit him best. He didn’t. There wasn’t.

And so in his first days of life Otis was known as Wayne, our in-utero name for him, after the great champions of the North Melbourne Football C lub – Schimmelbusch – Schwass – Carey. And then on his third day we called him Otis.

We get a lot of questions about his name. Is he named after Otis Redding? Otis – like the elevators? Will you name your next child Milo? For the record – No, No, and No.

Sometimes I look at him and wonder did we choose well? And then I look at him and think that every day he grows a little bit more into the name that we have given him, and hope that when he grows up he won’t change his name in adolescence, to Steel, or Oberon, or Maurice.

Otis (m). English name first derived via the German Otto from the old German Ot (riches) – or alternatively from the Greek for ‘keen-eared’. As a first name it is rare outside the USA, where its use was promoted by James Otis (1725 – 83), a hero of the American War of Independence. It has been bestowed occasionally upon girls as well as boys. Notable bearers of the name have included US actor Otis Skinner (1858 – 1942) and US soul singer Otis Redding (1941-67). The Penguin Dictionary of First Names, 2004.

Last weekend Otis celebrated his first birthday with a party. In the lead-up to the party much time was spent preparing the guest of honour - the frog cake.

The frog was chosen after much deliberation, and a number of expeditions to collect the necessary equipment were undertaken. I test baked the super delicious chocolate gingerbread cake. Finally the big day arrived.

Thankfully Mum was on hand to assist with the decoration.

The finished frog.

The frog is lit.

The frog meets his end.

Later in the day, Otis enjoyed a cupcake. Otis has made some small progress with his eating, and he is now regularly enjoying small sips of milk, sucking on biscuits, and licking chocolate icing.

Thank you so much to everyone who came along and helped to make Otis' party so lovely. We all had a wonderful time.