One Foreboding and Another Probably Annoying Milestone for Gabe

Yesterday, withing thirty minutes of one another, Gabe achieved two dubious achievements, neither of which I'm particularly excited about.

We were upstairs playing. I was feeding Button. Invariably, as soon as I start feeding her, Gabe gets it into his head that he needs me to do something for him. Usually he wants me to do something trivial and unnecessary--like find get him his blankie, which is probably laying on the floor about three steps away from where he is--but occasionally he comes up with something that he'd actually need my help with. Yesterday, he came up with the latter. He wanted the light turned on in our bedroom.

Now, obviously, he didn't NEED the light turned on in there because we've established, pretty clearly, that our bedroom and the extra bedroom aren't play rooms. Of course, this makes him want to play in both rooms all the more.

So, he started pointed at the light and repeating "Lght! Lght!" (he's sort of moving away from his "Gluh, glhy" that he used to call the light, but only sort of). I said, "I'm feeding the baby, so I can't help you right now." But he was insistent. After a few more persistent requests, I said, "Get one of your stools and turn it on yourself." He gave me a quizzical look, so I clarified, "Use your green stool back here. You know how to turn on the light."

So he did. He didn't use the green stool, instead choosing an old desk bench that we have upstairs, but he picked the thing up, carried it into the bedroom, set it down, got up on it, realized he couldn't reach the light from where the stool was, got down, moved it, got on it again, and turned on the light. He was VERY pleased with himself. So he got down again, then proceeded to spend the next five minutes getting down and up from the stool and turning the light on and off.

This has obvious implications. Though he's been using chairs to get up to the table and the light switch in the dining room, he's always had to ask me to move the chairs for him to facilitate whatever he wants to do. Now he knows that, with the help of something to stand on, he can reach things he's probably not supposed to. This should play out in various annoying forms as we have to, once again, re-baby proof portions of our house to keep him from destroying things we hold dear. Good times.

The second achievement came a little while later when we went downstairs. After the baby had settled down, I put her on the bed and Gabe wanted to go back downstairs (he didn't really WANT to go downstairs, I don't think, but he likes to make me do things just for the exercise of doing it--I knew he'd want to come back upstairs in another fifteen minutes once he remembered that the downstairs, with its 5,000 toys to entertain him and all of his coloring supplies, was boring).

For the last few weeks, whenever we go downstairs, I've been walking Gabe down to get him used to the activity. Nothing would make me happier than being able to leave the gate opened so he could get up to his room whenever his heart desired (though that's probably at least another six months away). I take his right hand, tell him to hold the rail with his left hand, then I lead him slowly down the stairs. It's usually a pretty slow process as, every step or two, he wants to sit down and start sliding down the stairs. Butt sliding down stairs is, of course, a time honored tradition among children, but our stairs aren't carpeted, and I know how Gabe likes to take things to extremes, so I always tell him to stop and remind him that we NEVER play on the stairs. I also remind him of the time he started dinking around on the bottom stair about six months earlier and fell and bonked his head. I doubt he actually remembers it happening, but he always ACTS like he remembers it and doesn't want it to happen again.

Anyway, yesterday, he stopped at the top of the stairs and peered down into the dining room. He inched his way right to the edge of the top stair and curled his little toes over the side. He looked at me, then he looked back down to the dining room.

"Jump!" he said.

I shuttered quietly while I envisioned the next twenty years of daredeviling.

Obviously I spent the next few minutes explaining how that was simply a TERRIBLE idea, but, knowing Gabe the way I do, I expect it's just a matter of time. I'm just glad that we have pretty good medical insurance.