Our younger son Tancred has started to crawl. He's just short of ten months old, and while it is in one respect an amazing and inspiring thing to see – Elvira and I have also been dreading this day.
For a few weeks, Tancred has been shuffling around on his bottom and almost getting himself into a crawling position. Generally, this move would be aborted as he failed to get one of his legs into the right position, and he'd make do with sitting up and rotating on the spot.
But now he's off. First stop – naturally - plug sockets behind a rocking chair. There's a room full of his toys, but he's showing his natural aptitude for mechanics by inspecting electrical equipment and heavy spring-loaded pieces of wood. When I left this morning to go to work, he was shaking the cable and transformer to Elvira's laptop. The perfect baby toy!
Now, we've got to baby-proof everything up to a height of about 30 inches off the ground (Tancred is enormous and very determined).
- Cups of tea are to be confined to the centre of tables, because as we learned with Roger Jr, there's nothing more than alluring to a baby than the sight of a steaming mug high above their head.
- Shoes also must be kept behind closed doors, lest they end up in Tancred's mouth being chewed.
- The dogs will need to be fenced off again, for their and Tancred's mutual safety.
This time around, of course, we have the added complication of a two-year-old (who insists that he's six) in the midst of potty training. So we have toilet equipment at ground level. And, of course, the ever-present force of nature that is Roger Jr himself who loves nothing more than to drag Tancred around the floor by his arms.
It's going to be a long 17 years.
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