Everything the Baby Currently Believes to be Basketball

The baby has recently entered into the age of fixations. His first and still-greatest love is the bike, which we keep upstairs in the garage, and woe to you if you say the word “bike” in his presence, because he will begin to chirp “Bike? Bike? Bike?” in gradually increasing volume and intensity, jabbing his ludicrously small fists at the garage door, until you take him upstairs and let him climb all over it.

His love of bikes has also produced the first wrinkle in our book-reading sessions. If a particular book has a bike in it (Boats on the Bay, Baby Go Japan, Everywhere Babies) he will let me get three or four pages in before grabbing the text from me and turning to the correct page, pointing triumphantly at the bike in question, and announcing “Bike” over and over, at which point he is no longer interested in having the rest of the book read to him and would like me to put it away. It has even lead to, I am sorry to say, dubious claims. Only last night I was reading Strega Nona to him and he began to leaf through the pages, chanting “Bike” to himself with perfect earnestness.

BABY [Leafing]: Bike. Bike. Bike.

SELF: Where is there a bike in Strega Nona?

BABY [Still confident]: Bike.

SELF: Where in this early modern Calabrian village did you see a bike? Show me the bike you’re thinking of. Where is the evidence?

BABY [Producing zero evidence of a bike, while admitting to precisely nothing] Bike.

It’s getting to be like that now with basketball hoops. There’s one in our neighborhood, which he passes often with his mothers during their afternoon walks, and of course most of the parks we take him to have basketball courts, too. It will not surprise you to learn that our nineteen-month-old has a charming and idiosyncratic way of saying the phrase “basketball hoop”: he says “Ba-ka-baa hoo.” He says it often and with great conviction. He adores basketball, and to him the category of “basketball” can include almost anything.

This is a partial and by no means exhaustive list of everything the baby currently believes to be “basketball”:

• Basketballs

• Every ball in the house

• Tennis balls

• The ping pong paddles in the basement

• The fishing net the mother bunny uses to catch her son in The Runaway Bunny (which does, admittedly, look remarkably like a basketball hoop)

• His bath toys

• Throwing a beach ball backwards over his head

• The wool ball we keep in the dryer to minimize static cling

• His little plastic baby doll, sometimes

• People playing soccer

• Pictures of people playing soccer in a baby book about types of shoes people wear

• A page from Boo and Baa where a cabbage rolls off their sled and becomes a runaway snowball

Please refer to this list as the definition expands; we will be monitoring the situation carefully as it develops. Be advised that his new favorite toy is now the vacuum cleaner, which he calls “Gana,” and that when I try to make him do things he doesn’t want to, like change his diaper or wipe his face, he will now list his mother’s names (“Lalamama….Gagamama….”) in the most plaintive tones imaginable, in order to kill me.