Mayhem Breaks Out!

We’ve been talking about babyproofing the house for weeks—months, really. We have sized up our living room, our sharp corners, our dangling power cords, our low shelves. And we have done… well, not nothing, but next to nothing. Even last weekend, when three suspicious-looking dudes I know brought their toddlers to visit, we didn’t quite pull it together. (Anyway, nobody lost an eye or shed any blood.) It seemed as though we’d deal with it when our son started creeping, then crawling, then walking.

What we didn’t count on was this: He want from Not Crawling One Bit to Not Only Crawling But Pretty Quick in no time at all. As of the middle of last week, he could move himself a couple of inches. Today, he can get across a room in under a minute. His parents, needless to say, are scrambling to reorder the house in order that he doesn’t get himself killed. In the meantime: constant, relentless supervision. (It’s a race to see which bad thing happens first — whether he bonks himself or something gets broken.)

Has anyone else had a developmental milestone come up this abruptly? I’m reminded of the old joke about Albert Einstein: It’s said that he couldn’t talk till he was 4 years old. Then one day he  looked at his parents over the lunch table and said, “My soup is too cold.” His parents were stunned, and asked him what on earth had been stopping him from talking. And he responded, “Everything’s been fine up till now.”

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About Christopher

Christopher Bonanos is a senior editor at New York magazine, where he works on arts and urban-affairs coverage (and a few other things). He and his wife live smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan, where their son was born in March 2009. Both parents are very happy, and very tired.

One thought on “Mayhem Breaks Out!

  1. I don’t think we’ve had a single milestone with either kids that wasn’t 3 days of crankiness followed by waking up the next morning to having the kid playing Mozart on the piano. Well perhaps not that. But it always seemed that way.

    I should warn you – We went from crawling to crawling fast to standing up pulling stuff off of tables in the space of a week.

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