Sentences

Some of Jack's milestones happen in discrete momentous occurrences.  The first time he sat up by himself was around 5 1/2 months, after I had read one afternoon that he should be trying to sit at that age, I realized I had never tried to get him to do that.  Fear of him falling on our hardwood floors was a significant factor.  So I sat him in his crib and we tried it out for a few minutes and he did it. The first time Jack stood alone for an extended period of time, Stacy and I were sitting on our living room floor while Kaia and Jack played around the high chair.  Suddenly Jack let go and stood there as we stared at him in amazement, he stared at us happily, then we stared at each other, then back to him.  It felt like he was up forever, and it really was an amazingly long 20 seconds or so.

Other milestones aren't really identifiably tied to any one happening but sort of happened over a few weeks.  First word?  Possibly the time he said "bubble" in the bathtub.  Or maybe it was when he started referring to his binky as "ba."  First smile?  There were the supposed gas bubbles when he was a few days old, and then there were the wide grins around the time of his baptism.  There wasn't a specific date that I can really tie to it; no age to enter into the blank in the baby book.

So what happened this morning may not have been his first sentence, and it certainly wasn't his first joining of words, but it's definitely the beginning of a new phase.  And I'm not sure I'm going to like this one.  As Ben and I were getting dressed this morning, Jack walked up to us and proudly announced, "Quack quack down!"  The past few days he's been interested in looking down the stairs and had started throwing balls down there, so I had a pretty good idea what had happened.  And, just as I had suspected, Jack's toy duck had indeed gone down and was lying at the bottom of the stairs.  Several balls followed as I was examining the duck and deciding what to do about Jack's new hobby.  At first all I could think of was that Tiny Toons episode where baby Plucky decides that everything should "Go dowwwn the hooooole!" (the skit starts around the 50 second mark)  Mindfulness of that is a major reason we always have the toilet lid closed when Jack flushes.  I'm relieved that Jack didn't choose that obsession.

Trying to find a middle ground between allowing Jack to explore and keeping other, less resilient household goods from suffering bumps and bruises of such falls, I determined that the best course of action would be to remove temptation and substitute some time later in the morning to drop only balls halfway down the stairs together.  That method has worked well in (generally) preventing Jack from throwing things other than balls.  I promptly moved the baby gate away from the stairs, assuming that removing the dropping results would prevent.  One of my boots, a half dozen hair clips and two bottles of contact lens solution soon formed a pile in the hall on the other side of the gate. 

I knew that when Jack was taking two two-hour naps a day last week that he was probably getting ready for some sort of cognitive development leap, but I was sort of hoping it would involve more words, less science experiments.