Baby Stories

I come by my wandering ways honestly. Most of the stories my parents tell about me as a baby involve some form of travel. As the oldest of three boys, my experience differed slightly from my younger siblings.

When I was an infant, I wore little white leather shoes that my mother polished every afternoon while I napped to ensure they were always perfect. These were the shoes I wore as I learned to walk. When the second boy came along, mom switched to brown shoes so she wouldn’t have to polish them daily. By the time the youngest was born, she had abandoned shoes altogether. The birth order effect is real, and I am a happy beneficiary.

Shortly after learning to walk, I put those little white shoes to work. We lived in an unairconditioned house at the time, which meant the doors and windows almost always stayed open. We had a screen door at the back of the house with a simple hook catch.

Mom left the screen door unlatched one afternoon, so my one-year-old self decided to push it open and go for a walk. Mom was probably ironing and watching television because she didn’t notice I was missing for a while. After what I am certain was a panic attack, she found me walking a good way down the street. As an adult, I still say, “Don’t fence me in!”

Sometime just before my second birthday, my parents took me on a long road trip to Idaho. My dad was delivering a water blaster to a customer somewhere up there. We were on the road for about a week and a half with me sitting between my parents in the front seat. There were no seat belts and no car seats. It was just us and the open road.

The benefit of this arrangement was that I had 100% of their attention the entire trip. Mom taught me how to do twenty-piece jigsaw puzzles on a piece of cardboard while they both narrated the drive. Story has it that, at some point, I got tired of listening and started talking, speaking my mind using complete sentences for the first time. They probably wished I had waited until we got home. Some people might wish I had never started talking at all.

So, think about that trip the next time you put your kid in a backward-facing car seat for a long drive with nothing to entertain them along the way. I learned to talk on a road trip to Idaho, and I don’t think I turned out so bad.