Crawling is weird

Our little commando just started to crawl. We are crazy proud, duh. He’s  a chubby little beast though, so he can’t do a normal baby crawl. He does this army style belly crawl and it’s hilarious.

He also poses on his side like some kind of seventies, hairy chested dude. It’s like there should be a tiger rug underneath him and a fireplace.

When The Squish gets tired of crawling, he arches his back and gesticulates all four limbs spastically; much like one of those desert lizards that cools its feet by lifting them all at once and balancing on its belly. I often imagine he’s an animatronic robobaby that’s controlled by a rod coming out of the ground into his stomach. In fact, there are numerous times when he really looks like an animatronic robobaby. I used to watch movies where they had fake babies and I would think “That baby looks fake”. Now I look at my baby and think he looks fake. So, I guess the fake baby actually looked like a real baby.

Another funny thing that has started since the onset of crawling is the flop-sweat inducing anxiety I get from watching him play with other babies. I take him to a story time at the library twice a week. I used to be jealous of the babies who were crawling around and playing. They were so cavalier about being able to move about and do stuff. Smug, really. Now, as The Squish has begun moving about, it freaks me out! Why, you ask? Because babies are sadists. They’re all about jabbing each other in the eye and bludgeoning each other with plastic blocks. It’s gruesome enough to watch some random babies doing it, let alone your own. So, like a lunatic, I hover over him as he plays. My wife tells me this is called “helicopter parenting”, which sounds cooler than it is. It’s fine, I don’t let him catch on to the fact that I don’t trust him. He hasn’t maimed anyone…yet, but the last thing I need is some overzealous parent freaking out because our little angel scratched their precious ray of sunshine. I don’t want to get black balled from all the cool baby-time stuff. I get enough of the “giving mom the day off?” looks as it is.

I’m trying to relax about this recent mobility, and I think it’s working. Luckily there’s enough goofball stuff that he does while tearing around the room to break the tension. He steals things from adults and crawls into their laps and cries. Well, really anything he does reduces me to an awe-stricken puddle of goo. I am his dad for Christ’s sake. Give me a break.

More soon,
Father of the revolution, aka Clinton