Half a Year and Counting

Collin has reached yet another important milestone in his development. He has survived six entire months with us as his parents! That is half of a year and coincidentally coincides (within a day) to Andrea's birthday which is also our anniversary. He also has teeth! 2 of them. I'm pretty excited that he is going to have teeth, but I think Andrea would rather he didn't (at least for a while) since she now has to teach him not to bite certain things.

But the big news is that he is crawling. He scooched along for a long time, but it is a full on crawl now. For a long time we could put him on the floor, go off for a minute, come back and he would be more or less in the same place we left him. Now, if we were to leave him alone for more than a minute he may very well be at the neighbor's house - or in Kansas. He hasn't asked for the car keys yet, but it's just a matter of time.

I've learned that when babies start to crawl they immediately head for the most dangerous thing in their immediate vicinity. There could be toys everywhere, but he had much rather bang his head on the coffee table or chew on a door stop. (Why do they build houses where every corner and edge is sharp??? Couldn't they round some of this stuff off?) But anyway, I think I've figured out why babies do this. We parents have an instinctive urge to protect our little ones and in order to balance this out, babies are born with an instinctive urge to kill themselves. There is some sort of evil natural selection going on here. It's as if one day they wake up and think: "You know what would really hit the spot right now? Some drain cleaner!" So they spend the whole day searching for drain cleaner. If they can't find any they'll either order some online or find something equally dangerous, like: "Hey - I wonder what its like inside the fireplace." Or: "That electrical cord looks scrumptious!" Some aren't quite so dangerous - just gross. Cat food comes to mind. Or chewing on the dog's chew toy. Parents have to respond to this by moving everything up out of their reach. I hear that you just keep moving things higher and higher until they are teenagers and everything you own is in the attic.

Luckily we've been able to keep Collin away from everything other than the odd head bump, but I had no idea we lived in such a dangerous place.

We aren't really trying to contain him as long as someone is watching him and it is delightful to watch him crawl around and he loves it - he'll follow Andrea from room to room and untie her shoes every chance he gets.