What Clara gets into...Merry Christmas.

I recently came across this blog on Reddit and laughed so hard I cried.  Read it HERE. In it, the blogger describes her 10-month-old's real present list to Santa.  I identified with almost every item on the list.

I will proudly  admit that I have done a really good job of hiding electrical cords from Clara but whenever I forget to close the bathroom door I return to the mayhem of a cloudy pile of unwound toilet paper, the items of the bathroom trash strewn across the floor, and the strong possibility of one of Clara's dolls posed in her potty, or (heaven forbid) if I have also forgotten to close the toilet seat, a soggy doll taking a bath in the toilet.

I would also love to know what aspect of our evolution has enabled small babies to grasp tiny objects - almost invisibly tiny objects - in their fingers and then carry them to their mouth for a taste.  Was food in the distant past so scarce that babies were crawling around under the tables fighting over tiny crumbs, Lord of the Flies style?  Because I find myself vacuuming the entire house every single day because no matter how clean the floor is Clara finds the one stale, ancient broken shard of Chex cereal hiding in a crack in the floorboard and pops it in her mouth before I can blink.  Ninja-style, Clara gets her hands on everything I think she shouldn't have.  Here's a picture she snapped with my phone after stealing it out of my pocket and running away with it, madly giggling and pressing buttons.  

At least she didn't purchase a ten dollar app like last time this happened.

Last week two of my Mommy friends came over with their children for a play-date.  18-month-old  twin boys and two 17-month-old  girls created a predictable cyclone of toys in Clara's room.  Us parents laughed as they pulled out every toy and book they could get their hands on, regarding it for mere seconds before tossing it in the growing pile in order to get something else.  Billie was digging around in Clara's crate of Duplos, pulling them out piece by piece with laser concentration.  That is, until her mother Sindy remarked in surprise: "Oh what's this?"  She reached over to Billie and pulled a perfectly preserved, dessicated Baby Carrot out of her daughter's tiny fist.

My first reaction was to be completely mortified - what kind of mother was I?  The kind that left a  baby carrot mummify in the toy box?  But instead I just laughed.  Maybe Clara thought she would save that carrot for later...a month and a half ago.  Or maybe she has a squirrel's instinct to bury food for the winter.  Either way I think I can place the blame squarely on my almost 18-month-old. At least the floor was vacuumed.

I swear that Clara grows an inch a day.  She has figured out that she can stand on tiptoes and run her hands over tabletops to see what kind of treasures her little hands can grab and pull down for a look-see. She is also determined to bounce across the couch and try to pull ornaments off our tabletop tree.  And let me tell you people...as sad as I was to get a tiny tree this year, I am so happy not to have to contend with the smackdown that would occur between Clara and a giant tree resting in a stand on the floor.  Because believe you me, by the end of that battle Clara would be left standing (albeit covered in sap and probably wearing the tree skirt on her head) in the smoking pile of rubble that would be the toppled tree, broken ornaments, and billions of pine needle that had been ripped of the branches.

So far this Christmas, Tabletop Tree - 1, Clara - 0.

Fall Down Go Boom!

Clara has been crawling and cruising for a month and a half now.  It wasn't enough for her to just crawl - she had to start pulling up and walking along the walls and the furniture the same day she showed off her crawling skills.  She's incredibly fast.  My (so far) successful attempts at childproofing the entire apartment have created a large space for her to bullet back and forth in.  I will walk out of her bedroom where she's busily playing, traverse the apartment to the kitchen and  30 seconds later Clara will appear in the the doorway of the kitchen.  She is that fast.

She's so good at the crawling and cruising it's easy to forget that she's a baby who's only been doing this for 45 days.   She sometimes is in such a hurry her oversized baby head gets too much momentum and topples over her arms resulting in a bumped head on the floor and many tears and cuddling.  The advent of two front teeth also resulted in a cut lip during one of her quick-crawl head over arms mishaps.  Seeing Clara bleed for the first time was a heart-stopping moment.  Clara was less upset and recovered more quickly than I did. 

Babies are resilient and babies do everything so fast.  Clara was 19 inches when she was born.  Today she's 30 inches.  That means she has grown 11 vertical inches in 11 months.  If I grew 11 inches in 11 months I think I'd just stay in bed in my pajamas and watch romantic comedies.  But Clara takes it all in stride - except for when she naps. She goes from an energized baby doing laps around the apartment to flat-out sleep in about 30 seconds. These are her power naps.  Restocking up her supply of super speed for the next few hours of the day.

It takes her a while to wake up from these deep-sleep naps.  This is her, sporting great nap-hair, yesterday afternoon.

Babyproof House

In my ongoing quest to baby proof my apartment there is one thing I have been trying to give Clara. Freedom.  I want the entire apartment to be her domain.  Apart from crawling inside the stove or the fridge, or putting her finger in a outlet,  I want her to be able to go anywhere and do anything.

My mother's biggest piece of parenting advice was "Never say no." I will addend this to "try to never say no."  I will have to say "No" if she foils my childproofing of the stove and tries to crawl inside.  Seriously. But I have made it okay for Clara to do some things in the apartment that I could try to forbid. 

Clara's current favorites are:

1) Pulling out shoes from under our bed and making piles of them all over the floor.

2) Pulling all the stacked diapers off the changing table shelf, and flinging the diapers everywhere.

3) Pulling books off the bookshelf.

4) Opening her one of her drawers and pulling out all of her hats.

5) Pulling open a door on our dresser and pulling out all my stored maternity clothes.

6) Pulling colanders and bowls off a lower shelf in the kitchen and playing with them while I am cooking.

Does it get a little boring putting the books back on the shelf, or re-stacking the diapers?  Well, yes. But judging by her laughs and coos and the tiny rebel gleam in her eye, she is having a good time and I can save my "Nos" for bigger, more serious things.

Nightmares realized...

So in all my well laid plans about childproofing, Gerald and I decided that we would make the entire apartment baby-crawler friendly.  The only room I wanted to keep off limits for a while was the bathroom.  My logic was that Clara is still a bit wobbly and I didn't want her falling down in a room full of hard surfaces.

So I have been practicing remembering to keep the bathroom door shut.  It was working pretty well until yesterday.  I got home with Clara and Gerald had to go out and find his mother, Susan who was lost getting to our apartment.  I was a bit distracted and ended up leaving the bathroom door open.

Clara was in her room playing (so I thought) and I was picking up around the apartment.  I walked back towards Clara's room to check on her and was presented with this scenario:

Clara was standing, in the bathroom, holding onto the rim of the toilet bowl.  One hand was holding on - inside the bowl - (UGH!) and the other hand was happily waving around the toilet brush!!!!! (DOUBLE UGH!)

If all my free-from fears of Clara getting sick or hurt due to some negligence on my part could resolve themselves into one picture - this would have been the picture.  Instead,  it was my reality in that moment, and what I did was laugh really hard.

I swopped Clara up in my arms, divesting her of the toilet brush in the process and shut the bathroom door.

Lesson learned? Babies will get into whatever it is you don't want them find/touch/eat.  And they will smile while doing it.