Congratulations are in order: over the course of the last two weeks, Bubba has officially been promoted from his position as Manager of Scooting and Rolling to a new role as Executive Vice President of Crawling Around And Getting Into Everything.
It’s an exciting upgrade for him, and I certainly admire his can-do spirit (he’s really moving up the corporate ladder; this is his third promotion in a matter of months!). Plus, I’ll admit that it’s pretty freakin cute. But the downside, of course, is that he is now essentially a ticking time bomb of potential injuries.
Do you know how many dangers there are in this house?! Outlets. Cords. Sharp corners and tables made out of glass (and best of all, furniture that combines both of the above into one surefire deathtrap!). Not to mention the unexpected hazards I keep finding, like the corner of the wall that is inexplicably deteriorating into a creepy hole of doom – the slightest touch results in a handful of baseboard and what I presume to be lead-tainted paint chips.
Of course Bubs was drawn to that rapidly-expanding cranny like a teenaged me to black eyeliner; he was investigating that situation within minutes of becoming mobile:
(sidenote: I assure you, my floors are not as filthy as my photos would suggest – those are paint splatters. Everywhere. I’m pretty sure that the day before we moved into this house, the owners realized they had forgotten to paint, and had a conversation something like this: “Shit! The walls! Bob, do we have any old cans of paint in the garage or something? Yes, seafoam green is fine! Grab it and just start CHUCKING IT IN THE AIR – some of it is bound to hit the walls! HURRY!”)
Luckily, all of Bubba’s free-ranging activity has been contained to one room. Conveniently enough, our family room is one step down from the rest of the house, and obviously a newly crawling baby can’t possible learn how to scale a 6″ tall mountain! So I babyproofed the shit out of this room (including, obviously, duct-taping up the Cranny of Despair, which, as you can imagine, really adds to the room’s charm) and he’s been having a blast exploring every corner of it (and making daily attempts to peel off the aforementioned duct tape in an attempt to gain access to the Cranny once more) while I nervously follow him around and do annoying things like stop him from eating my shoes and wiping dog hair off his hands. It’s good times, folks.
If you’ve guessed by this point that I was naive in my assumption that a newly crawling baby could not learn how to surmount a 6″ summit in the form of a single stair, YOU ARE CORRECT! How clever you are. This morning I left my shoes – which, for some reason, he is drawn to like a teenaged me to terrible boyfriends – at the top of the stair, and that was all the motivation he needed to figure out how to escape the nice safe confines of the babyproofed family room. By the end of the day, he was climbing that sucker like a seasoned mountaineer:
Does anyone want to come over and babyproof the rest of my house?
The Baby Is Fine 
Nick saw this before I did and TORMENTED me with the exciting news that Ryan can now crawl–and the fact that I am a bad auntie for not knowing first! Haha
HEE HEE HEE! I remember those days! Mo!
OMG, could he be cuter?! Adorable! Ugh, I remember the days of childproofing. My son is 9 now, and I STILL haven’t removed the kid-safe electric socket plates. I’m so used to them that I keep forgetting. I promise you that it seems overwhelming now, but he will pass through this stage in a flash.