This month Junior will turn one, and it
blows my mind. I'm not sad
he's not a baby anymore or any rubbish like that, and, frankly, I
like Junior a lot better now because he is a whole lot easier to deal
with. I'm just saying the time has passed ridiculously fast.
He's a little boy
now, and his personality is coming out, which is hilarious and
sometimes a little concerning. He has decided he is too old and cool
for baby food and only wants to eat what we're eating. Problem is, he
can't always eat what we're eating and every meal is an epic battle
of wills.
He has recently
turned into Isaac Newton and is constantly conducting experiments
with gravity. These experiments consist mainly of dropping things and
watching them fall. Groundbreaking, if you're a baby; extremely
annoying, if you're the adult picking up after said baby. Anything he
can get into his chubby little hands, he immediately throws.
Earlier this week I
was carrying him with me to pay the rent. We live on the second story
and he plucked the rent check from my hands and threw it down the
apartment stairs, watching intently as it fluttered down from the
balcony and was carried away by the breeze and lost forever. We might
be homeless, but that is a small price to pay for the scientific
advancement of babies.
Or maybe instead of
Isaac Newton, Junior thinks he is B. F. Skinner and is researching
how many times a grown man will pick up a toy that is repeatedly
thrown by a small child before the grown man stops picking it up or
has a nervous breakdown.
Throwing
things is pretty harmless, but some of the other things he's into
lately worry me a little. For example, everywhere we go he is hitting
on the ladies. Whenever any female of any age comes around he
automatically gets this coy little baby smile and starts showing off
and flirting. He likes girls his own age, but he really prefers older
women. He likes the 4 year old cougars, and even women who are quite
literally old enough to be his mother or grandmother.
He
inherited his mother's big brown eyes, so he does pretty well for
himself. He has girlfriends everyplace we go: the post office,
grocery store, restaurants, doctor's office, church, my office. If I
go to the grocery store without him the clerk will be like, “Where's
Junior? Bring him with you next time. And tell him to call me. He's
been really distant lately.”
What
really is going to cause us trouble is how much Junior loves to be
naked. Once we pull him out of the bath he is immediately trying to
get away and escape into the night, stark naked. When I'm changing
him he always tries to break away. In the time it takes me to
take off the old diaper and grab a new one he will have already
sprint-crawled across the room, cackling like a mad baby. And then I
have to chase him. He's even figuring out how to take off his own clothes, so he no longer has to wait for one of the aforementioned opportunity to go naked.
I hope he grows out of it, because it
won't be funny once it's the police chasing him.
What should we expect from Junior in year #2? Please leave a comment, I'll love you forever.
