Parenting

With a toddler on the move, we’ve had to up our game


We hit a milestone this week, when our son began crawling. Not quite proper crawling, with knees and elbows working in tandem to achieve their goals, more like a wounded soldier pulling himself by arms alone, or the Terminator when his legs are all smashed up. It’s disconcerting because I’m simultaneously proud and under no illusions that this development is anything but an absolute ball ache.

For one thing, now that he’s mobile, we have come to realise our house is very much that ungainly collection of sharp, fatal objects we feared. We thought we’d childproofed our home months ago, but it now appears we had merely moved a few picture frames and placed the heavier candles near the coffee table’s centre. In the orgy of self-praise that followed those exertions, we’d neglected to realise we kept scissors, knitting needles and boxcutters at eyeball height throughout our – thankfully not yet ironically named – living room.

Even with the sharp stuff stowed away, there’s no object with which he wouldn’t be able to injure himself. He’s the MacGyver of hurting himself; hand him a wet wipe and a cushion and he’ll fashion a torture device capable of dispensing eight heart attacks per minute. Those coasters in the little recess under the table aren’t particularly threatening, until you imagine sucking on them like a lozenge until eight years’ build-up of spilled drinks are released into your waiting, grateful mouth.

Then there’s the mess. If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago, I’d have said our floors were cleaner than Marie Kondo’s chip pan. I now know they’re swimming in filth, since the boy has spent the past week cleaning them with his stomach, laying down a snail’s trail of polished hardwood, depositing the crud upon his person instead. This would be fine if he wore the kind of ramshackle hand-me-downs I did as a child; mottled shellsuits, polyester smocks and dungarees so old they may have been stitched together from the sails of famine ships. But it was his good fortune to be my in-laws’ first grandchild, which means he dresses infinitely better than I do, or at least he did until he decided to cover his every garment with an irreparable layer of floor grime.

It’s not all go, however, since he does now have a favourite rest stop. Several times a day he delivers himself, ecstatically happy, to a little area in the corner of our living room. There he sits, like the cast of Doctors at the National Soap Awards, happy and proud to have gotten there, no matter how pointless their presence is in the grand scheme of things.

There he sits, elated and filthy, rejoicing in his very own freedom of movement. It’s a precious thing, so I gird my loins, and pledge not to curtail it for him yet.

Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats





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