Saturday, July 5, 2014

Entry 240: I Might Have to Outfit My Son with Carabiners

It's all over now.  Lil' S can climb out of his crib.  He's not even two, and he can go right over the top.  So goes our last line of defense against bedtime tantrums.  Now we are not sure what to do.  We are thinking about just taking a side off, so that it's just a normal bed, but he still rolls around a lot at night, and S is worried he's going to roll off and hurt himself.  Also, I don't like the idea of him being able to wander around his room at night.  It's pretty well babyproofed, but short of removing every piece of furniture and padding the walls like an insane asylum, there's still going to something he can (and will) get into that he shouldn't.  He'll climb his dresser or the window sill, or he'll mess with the space heater or the blinds.  He doesn't have enough sense yet to stay away from things that could hurt him, and he's still a bit too young to understand "no" -- punishing him is starting to work a little bit, but it still has a very limited effect.  So I'm thinking we leave the crib intact for now.  It will be, at the very least, a deterrent for getting out of his crib ... hopefully.


[Conquered]

My sister and brother-in-law, K & F, came to visit for a few days, which was excellent.  They have two kids B & G, whom Lil' S loves to follow around.  We just hung around the neighborhood, which was nice.  Downtown DC gets ca-ray-zee on the 4th and unless you enjoy spending the day being stampeded by droves of drunk, sweaty, red-white-and-blue-clad patriots, you should it avoid it altogether.  I used to go to the National Mall for the fireworks back in my carefree, singles days (it's a fun stampede, at least), but I couldn't image doing it now with a 22-month old.  We actually didn't even see any fireworks.  S applied to get tickets to watch from the rooftop of her office, but she lost the lottery.  It's just as well -- all the kids (and most the adults) were asleep before the big show even started.

We had a cookout here, at our place, which was actually a "cook-in", because we don't own a grill.  That's on me.  I've been meaning to buy one since we moved in two and a half years ago.  I've just been putting it off because I don't know what to buy, and I've been too lazy to do the research on it.  It's a lame excuse, I know.  I should just go to Ace Hardware and buy something.  If it's not the world's greatest grill, who cares; I'm not the world's greatest griller.  But anyway, we don't have one now, so we had to cook everything in the oven, which is fine, it still tastes good, but it's much less satisfying -- less American.


[I snagged this off a Facebook friend's page.  The caption was "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter".]

Our big outing on the 4th was taking the wee ones to the playground.  It's one of those playgrounds that's divided into two -- one for the little kids and one for the big kids.  Lil' S is actually too young for the little kid section -- the posted age range is 2-5 -- but I've seen even littler kids there, and it's perfectly fine.  He definitely shouldn't be in the big kid section, but his cousins were there (they're 8 and 6), so of course he wanted to be there too, so I let him run around.  The problem isn't that he can't climb any of the big-kid toys.  It's that he can climb them, and then he gets stuck and I have to get him, or he doesn't get stuck but I think he's going to get stuck and it makes me nervous.

There is one toy in particular, it's like a 20-foot high turret, and to get up to the very top, you have to go up a ladder that's like a set of monkey bars turned perpendicular to the ground.  It's about five or six rungs high.  He climbed it!  I couldn't believe it.  I was pretty proud, I must admit, but I also felt very uneasy about the whole thing.  It's all enclosed up top, so it's pretty safe, but he started dangling his legs between the safety bars, which even though he couldn't fit through them, just looks bad.  We got him to go down the slide (which are enclosed like water park slides and my sister was on the other end to catch him), which I could tell was kinda scary for him, but he popped right up and ran back for another round.  I let him go one more time, and then that was it.  I was starting to get self-conscious about being judged by the other parents.  If he somehow got hurt, I could imagine them all later saying, "Well, he was too young; he shouldn't have been there in the first place!"  Plus, it really is for bigger kids.  If there is a helicopter dad hovering around to make sure his way underage son doesn't slip through the gaps, it kinda ruins the experience for the other children.  I'd probably raise an eyebrow at me if I was one of the other parents there.  It should be noted, however, that the big toy was basically empty when we were doing this.


[In honor of the 4th]

My worry now is that the next time we go back to that playground, Lil' S is going to just want to go to the big kid section the entire time, and then I'm going to be one of those d-bag parents explaining to all the other parents that my child is "bored" with the all the age appropriate toys, and that he needs to "properly challenged".

In other news of the past few days, my nephew B has an iPhone that doesn't have phone service, but can still send texts to other iPhones.  So we were goofing off and text each other silly messages while he was here.  And then a few hours after they left this afternoon, I get a message from him "What r u doing?" followed 10 seconds later by "Hello?" and then "Helllllllllo?", and that's when I thought--oh, right, giving a 8-year old my phone number might not be the greatest idea in the world.  But I don't really mind.  It's cute.  (He's asked me a few times if he's "interrupting" me, which I found really sweet.)  I just have to be careful what I say.  I wouldn't say anything inappropriate, but I like to joke with him, and jokes don't translate well via texts to adults, let alone to prepubescent kids.  I'll just have to be sure to be nice and use lots of LOLs when I make jokes.

Alright that'll do 'er this week.  Until next time ...

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