Whew. It seems like just a couple of weeks ago I was busy being thrilled that The Boy had figured out how to pull himself up on my fingers and would take a tentative step forward. Today, I can barely believe that its the same boy that we’re dealing with. By last week he was running around at the wedding and had gotten pretty good at pulling up on a pair of fingers and running laps. He was generally deciding on his own where he wanted to go and who he wants to visit, and really, I was only there for balance and as a cheering section. Overall though, he wasn’t very mobile on his own yet. He could butt-scoot a little bit, but generally if he wanted to get somewhere he had to call for a pickup. On our last day in LA, something clicked for his butt-scooting technique and suddenly he was moving.
Since getting home, he’s been EVERWHERE.
On the first day back, I got home from work and found Emily collapsed on the couch and everything less than 2 feet off the floor spread throughout the room. Skip forward to today, where he’s adopted a strange one-legged scoot-y sort of gate. He ends up with his left leg pushed behind him in near a crawl position, but his right leg stays folded up ahead of him, much like a sprinter passing over a hurdle. When he gets a direction in mind, he’s able to scoot forward on his butt and front leg surprising speed and purpose. I say surprising because I was surprised at how fast he managed to get across the kitchen and start spilling the cats water dish. This afternoon he was scooting around the kitchen chasing a foam ball that Greg and Naama gave him. He’d scoot across the floor to the ball, pick it up, giggle like a maniac, and then roll it across the room again. It was like a game of fetch with Liam playing all the parts. This is of course, was only after we dissuaded him something like 25 times from scooting over and continuing to spill the cat’s water dish.
The cats, by the way, have come to know fear and stare it in it’s 10-month old eyes. I think it is that previous games, such as Bumper Cats, were limited by daddy’s attention span. For ages now, the cats have known that while they cannot avoid my indignities, they can simply outlast them and emerge the moral victor. Liam however, is blessed with boundless energy and an unmatched zeal for kitten petting. Having lived soft and kept lives, the kittens have lost their natural survival instincts, and routinely fail to notice a 10-month-old butt-scooting up behind them. The boy has been in bed for 3 hours now, but shuffling sounds behind Maus still cause him to leap into the air like a startled armadillo.
