Mommy's Little Explorer

These days you are on the move all the time!  The gate is up, doors to the basement and bathrooms must be closed, floors need to be swept or vacuumed, small toys put away, trash and recycling cans need to be guarded...Maybe it is because you are the 4th child and I cannot watch you as closely as I should be every moment of the day, but I think mainly it is that you are the strongest and most determined baby that we have had and you explore and get into everything!  No obstacle is too difficult to break through for you!

At times you explore so hard you crawl right out of your pants!

At first, you began by crawling through small spaces.  Back when you were still army crawling you would squeeze through the tiniest of spaces.  You would crawl through the exersaucer or through tight spaces between couches or toys.  It seemed as if you purposefully sought out these tiny spaces just to see if you could make it through.

Then, you tried to climb over things.  You would climb over the cross bar on kitchen chairs.  (You are the first baby we've had since we got these "new to us" chairs.  And you face planted too many times on the hard kitchen floor, so out came the "old" kitchen chairs that had no cross-bar.  Problem solved...at least until you found something else to scale.

Getting ready to crawl over the cross-bar

Here are the safer chairs to crawl through!

You have Swiffered our kitchen floor with your belly and have picked up every little speck of grossness on it (just like your brother Jeremiah did)  Only you wanted to match the grossness of David (when I fished a dead fly out of his mouth)  so you found a ladybug to eat one day.  Delicious!  Not to mention the other leaves, small kid toys, and day old dinners I have to fish out of your mouth

Then we had to make sure that you could not tip over any toys onto yourself.  At our kid table after you squeezed through tiny spaces, you would pull yourself up to a stand, then push down the (pretty heavy for a 17 lb-er) kid-sized wooden chair.

Sometimes you just like to find a small
space to squeeze into to drink your milk!

 .

At the beginning of November we had
to get out the gate!

And finally to show your super-strength and determination to NOT be barricaded in the family room.  In an attempt to block you from getting into the kitchen I would set up a barricade using larger items in the room:  ottoman, exersaucer and pillows, boxes, baskets, music table, etc.  So you hated the barricade so much, you climbed over your Baby Einstein Music table not once, but twice and face-planted on the ground as I was running to catch you both times.  And then the next day you decided to crawl into the laundry basket of toys that was part of the baricade; thankfully Daddy got you (and was able to snap a pic) before you crawled head first out the other side!

This is the same table you successfully crawled over!
It comes up to your mid-belly!

Here you are trying to crawl out the other side of the toy basket!

Face-plants for a baby with glasses are a totally different story that a baby with no glasses.  You have already scratched the center of the lens from your face-plant, not to mention the bruises or rings around your eyes.  Thankfully the MiraFlex glasses are flexible enough that you have not cut yourself or broken the frames from doing all of these stealth super-hero stunts!  BUT I am so thankful for that fight in you, your strength and determination, because that is why I can celebrate these milestones today!

Our strong little superman