You Can't Stop Him, You Can Only Hope To Contain Him

"Me and my castle"

So our teenie guy has been mobile for about a month now and he keeps getting better, stronger, faster. We originally set up little speed bumps when he was just rolling around and those seemed to work well - he would just roll and stop. Then he would go the other way. Then, he learned to crawl and he would crawl up to them and contemplate what to do. Sometimes he would manage to figure out how to get past them. Since they were just velcroed to the floor, he sometimes kicked them loose or crawled up to them, grabbed them, and ripped them loose, holding the bumper in the air in celebration before seeing something else, getting distracted and rushing after the new object. Which brings us to now...

"Me in my castle, a.k.a. The Fun Zone"

I want to be over there and nothing will stop me, grrrrr. Except when we accidentally rolled out of control onto the tile and waaaAAAAAHHHHHHHH! That wasn't very fun, but darn it, I still want to go that way. So we had to buy this lovely little baby gate to contain him.

"Hey, that looks interesting!"

And what does he do? He starts to pull himself up!!! Seriously, stick with crawling for a bit. It can't be old yet, you just started. Savor the moment, enjoy it for a while. But no, Nathan wants to stand, so every chance he gets he tries to pull himself up. It's kind of funny too, every time he gets standing he looks around for us and then smiles really big like, "Look at me!!! Look what I can do! Hee hee."

"Look mommy, one hand!"

And of course the baby gate is just short enough to leave a small opening, just enough for crawl through. And guess who should happen to find it immediately and ever since be automatically be drawn to it like it has its own magnetic pull?

"I'm FREE!!!"

And speaking of magnetic pull...Nathan can seem to find any and every little hazard that we should have baby proofed for. And not only that, the stuff we can't move or block just yet, he remembers where it is. I thought that it was "out of sight, out of mind" for the first year. But, no, once he found the speaker cord and realized how wonderful it tasted (kind of like french vanilla ice-cream, I suppose) he heads straight for it. I will pick him up and put him back in the fun zone and he is immediately off and crawling through the opening, around the sofa, and behind the speaker until it's back in his tiny little hand. I think he has a little map somewhere...

And he's getting faster too, he can now cross the room about as fast as I can. So whereas we used to have time to put him at one end of the room and make a sandwich (while still watching him, of course) before he could get into any trouble. Now, he's crawling out of the room with us, side by side. So he has been keeping us on our toes.

Sonoma too. Now that he is mobile he enjoys chasing Sonoma around. Luckily for Sonoma, she is faster than all of us, but I'm sure she gets sick of moving all the time to escape the little fur grabber.