YO MAMA: An unexpected dilemma

It began as an adorably spontaneous act of comedy and quickly became an inconvenient dilemma: my nine-month-old son had discovered my mouth.

The first time it happened, I was singing the kid his bedtime lullaby, Moon River. I’m getting pretty good at it — I mean, I have sung it about 800 times.

So, there we were, rocking and singing, the kid’s head on my shoulder, when it suddenly dawned on him to jam his fingers in my mouth.

“Woon wiver, wider wen a wile, I’m cwossing woo in style…” I sang on, trying not to bite his tender little fingers. The kid chortled.

“Cah-hah-hah!”

He continued laughing, and then I started laughing — it was pretty funny after all — and we had ourselves quite the giggle fest.

BIG MISTAKE.

I’d given him a reaction — a positive one at that — and now he wanted this new game to go on forever and ever.

The hilarity had worn off for one of us — the one who wanted to go watch Workin’ Moms with a cup of tea and a chocolate chip cookie.

The kid continued wheezing with laughter. He eventually giggled himself to sleep and I went downstairs thinking the whole thing was actually pretty adorable. I was sure he’d forget all about it overnight.

But the following morning, I hoisted him out of his crib and his eyes zeroed in on my face with a wicked little grin. With incredible speed and agility he used one hand to pull my top lip up like a curtain and the other to explore my back molars. No boundaries whatsoever with this mini-human.

“No thank you, we don’t put our fingers in peoples’ mouths,” I said.

"Cah-hah-hah!"

I was held hostage by a tooth-tickler. You could never even conceive of such an inconvenience prior to living with a child. It’s like co-existing with a little monkey. They have no comprehension yet of our societal norms and exist purely to explore, experience and have fun. I didn’t want to limit his sensory experience of the world but the fingers in the mouth thing was becoming a problem.

It was time to get creative. I tried pinning his hands underneath my arms while carrying him but he just pinched the flabby skin near my armpits. Next I tried biting his fingers — gently of course, testing his reaction with increasing pressure — but that just made him laugh more. It seemed that he got a real kick out of it.

It really became a problem when I was on the phone, the kid on my hip, making a doctor’s appointment, when he once again saw the opportunity to dig around in my mouth.

“I’m sowwy,” I said to the receptionist. “My son has his finguhs in my mouf.”

She laughed and said something about every kid going through a “dental exam” phase.

“Can you give him a toy to distract him?” she asked.

If only it were that easy, I wanted to tell her. I had already tried all the best toys in the house but none could compete with my mouth — the one thing I couldn’t exactly put out of reach.

Somewhat ironically, the arrangement wasn’t mutual. While he claimed unfettered access to my teeth, I was not granted access to his. If I so much as tried to slip a pinky into his mouth for corroborating evidence that he was, in fact, teething, he simply turned his head away in disgust. How dare I try to inspect his teeth? You could practically hear him muttering “why is this nincompoop trying to put her fingers in my mouth?”

Fellow mamas assured me the phase wouldn’t last forever. That’s the bittersweet thing about babies, no stage ever lasts for long. My friends were right. After a few days, the novelty wore off and he found a new target: my glasses.

What will be next?

— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.

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