Don't Turn Your Back

We've definitely got a troublemaker on our hands.

He's been sitting up on his own for a while now and rolling from front to back and back to front. He was sort of scooting backwards a week or so ago, but he couldn't figure out how to go forward.





















Well sometime in the last week, he solved that mystery and the dude is officially on the move now. So we essentially went from being the owners of a caged gerbil to becoming the owners of... well a small monkey really. A small, slightly inebriated monkey.

So we've got the crawling and now we've added the standing and walking. And that's where the real danger comes in because our sweet boy has not even close to mastered either of those skills, but he refuses to believe us when we tell him that.

He reaches out and pulls up on anything within his grasp, and after standing for a minute or two, looks around to make sure you know he's standing, and that's when his balance falters and he goes down like a ton of bricks. 95% of the time, he falls on his cushiony butt. The other times, he falls on some combination of arm, shoulder, chest and of course, face. Sometimes he cries but sometimes he laughs which I like think is a sign that maybe he could be a professional daredevil or at least a circus entertainer or someting, both of which are promising and upwardly mobile career paths.

That's basically where we're at now. He was fairly easy to keep an eye on, he was good at playing by himself, and best of all he was immobile for the most part. Now, he's on the warpath and making up for lost time. We can't turn our backs on him for a second, or he'll speed over to the entertainment center and try to eat the Playstation or eat the dust out of the vacuum or eat one of our filthy sandals. Or he'll crawl over to the bookshelf and let us know what he really thinks of 100s of children's books by tossing them across the room. Or he'll stand up on this plastic rolling walker that Karen bought him that delights with both musical elements like the brain infecting "Rockin Robin" (tweet tweet) and physical challenges like wheels and a manufacturers warning that this toy is designed for 3 year olds. And so on. He can't be trusted is my point.

Don't judge her too harshly though on the toys, she feels compelled to purchase any piece of Chinese made plastic that cost less than 20 dollars. To pass by these items without buying them is tantamount to neglect in her eyes which is why we now have a bookshelf, living room, basement, guest room, workroom, garage and backyard full of this junk that would survive a nuclear attack, but will certainly send Tommy to the hospital if he chews on it too for too long. You should all buy some Fisher Price stock, because if we have another baby, I'm going to have to start working nightshifts at White Castle to pay for these treasures.





















He's got two teeth coming in on the bottom and luckily, he's carrying on the family tradition of crooked teeth. Does Fisher Price make braces? If so, Karen should be able to track down a used pair at a garage sale and we can straighten out these chompers on the cheap right now. You can feel them when he chews on your hand and they feel like steel topped with sandpaper, so I can understand why he cries about them.






















We've also been enjoying the Glen Ellyn pool this summer. He loves it there and it helps cool his skin down when his eczema is acting up. There are a lot of kids there, and I've learned that children's primary objective at the pool is to sprint from one side to the other trying to slalom all the adults and or infants in their path. We usually go in the afternoon to beat the heat, but also because they have adult swim at 3pm. When I was a kid, adult swim was this torturous, amazing waste of time, as there were never more than 4 adults in the Olympic sized pool, while all of us kids sat there and watched these geriatrics hobble in and backstroke for 15 minutes. Now that I am one of those 4 adults I understand the absolute necessity of this sanctioned break.

It's been a lot of fun lately. We go back and forth between "Oh my God, I love you!," to "Oh my God, when is nap time?". It's been almost 9 months and I think we like him more and more each day.

Oh yeah, Karen has roughly 2300 photos of him and him alone on her phone, so we're going to post a bunch at the end here just for fun. Enjoy.