The Small Family   

Most of you undoubtedly know that Theo’s middle name is Henry, after the nurse anesthesiologist who gave me my lovely epidural (and because we just liked how the name sounded with “Theodore”). However, this week it has come to my attention that Theo’s middle initial could also stand for Houdini or Hillary (as in Sir Edmund). Because young Theo has spent this week doing two main things: escaping and climbing.

Let’s start with escaping. On a small scale, Theo escaped from a diaper this week. We usually use cloth diapers, but we had him in a disposable diaper one day because all of our cloth diapers were in the wash. Chris put Theo in his crib for a few minutes to put the laundry in the dryer, and he came back  in to find Theo happily dancing and bouncing in the crib, stark naked, kicking the diaper beneath him. Evidently Theo figured out in short order how to remove disposable diapers and decided that his made a good soccer ball. Thank goodness our cloth ones have snaps that would be quite hard for his little fingers to manage!

But on a larger scale, Houdini figured out how to escape from his stroller! Our big jogging stroller has a really tight belt clip that he can’t undo, but we have a smaller stroller we keep in my car, and it has a belt that unlatches by pressing a button and pulling the strap. Twice in the past week, I found one side of it undone, but I thought, “He can’t possibly be undoing it.” Um, yes he can. I shan’t underestimate my son again! We went to the mall for a little playtime at the play yard one day this week, and afterward we stopped at a Starbucks kiosk for some coffee. I paid for the coffee and put my wallet back in the diaper bag, and then looked down at Theo in the stroller. Only Theo wasn’t in the stroller. Instead, he was pretty much doing a headstand on the tile floor of the mall, dangling from the stroller by one foot, which had gotten caught. I thought my heart was going to stop, but he seemed nonplussed. He was just staring at me in confusion, as if wondering how he had come to be standing on his head! Thankfully, my reflexes were quick, and I grabbed his foot and pulled him back into the stroller. As far as we can tell, he unlatched the belt and then leaned out the side of the stroller, lost his balance, and toppled out the side...but one foot got stuck, so he didn’t fully crash to the ground. Thank goodness! We decided to replace that stroller with one with a better belt clasp, but when we went out looking a few days later, Houdini managed to again unbuckle the belt, though this time we saw him before he lunged out. We found a good replacement at the consignment store and traded our escape-friendly one in for it. (I should note that there’s nothing wrong with the stroller’s belt and clasp—it’s just that our kid has figured out how to unlatch it! If it was faulty, I certainly wouldn’t sell it to a consignment store for some other unsuspecting parent.)

But if we don’t wish to switch Theo’s middle name to Houdini, we could also switch it to Hillary, after the great mountaineer, Sir Edmund Hillary. Because Theo has figured out how to climb, and he’s climbing everything in sight! Most often it’s his toddler recliner chair from Grandma Diane—he likes to stand on that and stare right at Chris, because he knows it drives Chris nuts when he does it. (Chris has been the main enforcer of the “no standing on the furniture” rule these days—I’ve been sticking with “no touching the stove knobs,” which Theo has figured out how to turn and tries to do on a regular basis.) However, Theo will climb anything and everything. The stairs. Bags of books. His toy piano (he has realized he can get onto the couch by using the piano as a stair of sorts). The slide at the park. His rocking horse in his room. His changing table. The dishwasher. I could go on and on. The child has no fear...which simultaneously delights me (because I had a lot of fears as a kid, and I am glad I haven’t passed that on to him) and terrifies me (because I have visions of ending up in the ER at least once a year with him if he doesn’t start being more careful!).

So those are the two big items for this week. In other news, we have decided that we need spontaneity back in our lives. My friend Janeane and her husband, Jason, took their daughter, Emma, to Disneyland recently, on a spur-of-the-moment trip decided literally 48 hours before they left. I confessed to Chris that I really missed the spontaneity that we used to have in our lives—we used to do fun things just because we felt like it, and it seems we haven’t done much of that in the past 13 months. We get so caught up in work and raising Theo that we forget to just have fun on the spur of the moment...and Janeane and Jason’s wild trip reminded me that we really ought to try to do that sometimes. So, on Saturday, we headed to Napa for a book sale and lunch at the Oxbow Public Market...and Theo was in such a good mood that we decided, “What the heck—let’s make a day of it and head to San Francisco. Why not?” And we had a fantastic time! We went to the zoo, where Theo enjoyed looking at the penguins, the siamangs (a type of primate—hopefully I spelled it correctly!), and the prairie dogs. The only problem was, Theo enjoyed the animals so much that he would throw a fit every time we tried to leave to move on to the next animal area. Really, I think he just wanted to be down and crawling. But whatever the reason, he was quite adamant about his desire NOT to be held and NOT to be in the stroller. After the zoo, we decided that Theo needed some time to really stretch his legs and get some energy out, so we found a wonderful part of Golden Gate Park with a huge grassy area and a really neat playground. Theo crawled and swung and climbed and slid...he had a blast! He met a cute little girl named Isabella and an adorable little boy named Charlie, and by the time we left the park, he was a happy, tired boy. The weather was gorgeous in the city (much cooler than Sacramento!), and we had a great time. And it was so nice to do something “just because” again. I have missed that!

And another nice thing this week was a grown-up date for Chris and I. Well, grown up in the sense that no one was hurling Cheerios at us throughout the meal. Our friend Briagha volunteered to babysit Theo, so Chris and I jumped at the chance to go out for dinner (BBQ) and some bowling and video games. (I won one game of bowling and Chris won the other; he won both video games, and I won both air hockey games and our basketball toss tournament. We’re pretty well-matched!) And Briagha reported that Theo was very good and went to bed without a problem, which bodes well for this coming Monday, when Grandma Diane is watching Theo so Chris and I can go to a Fleetwood Mac concert for Chris’s birthday.

Yes, birthday—on Monday, Chris will turn 33! And, oddly enough, his favorite band in the entire world is playing in Sacramento that night. Chris has wanted to take me to see Fleetwood Mac since I met him 4 1/2 years ago...and they are FINALLY coming to Sacramento, and it’s on his birthday. How cool is that?! So, we’ll have another grown-up date, which we are very much looking forward to.

This upcoming week is going to be very hectic, though. We leave for Texas on Friday, and we’ll be gone for a week—four days in Texas and then three days in Colorado. Which means no blog post next week! But, I’ll have lots of pictures and stories when we return, I’m sure, so I’ll torture you all with a long blog post in two weeks!

In the meantime, I have to try to get as much work done as I can before we go, though it looks like I’ll have to bring a laptop and do some work in the evenings. WAH!! NOT happy about that at all. Oh well, what can you do? And, I have to take some time off Wednesday to go back to the dermatologist. Unfortunately, my “suspicious” moles all tested as atypical at the lab, so they need to take more tissue out of at least one spot to make sure they got all the bad cells. And, since all four tested as abnormal, I have to have more of them looked at, too. Ugh, more stitches in my future, I think. Blech. But, I am glad I had them checked out early. The doctor sounded pretty optimistic that we caught them before they turned cancerous, so I think they’re still just in the “abnormal but not dire” stage at the moment. Still, I would’ve preferred to get a clean bill of health of the bat on that one. Oh well, I’m sure it will turn out okay in the end.

Have a great two weeks, everyone! And wish us well on our 5 1/2 hour plane trip to Texas Friday. Yikes! At least on the way back, we’ve split it up into two two-hour flights, separated by three days in Denver. But on the way there, it’s all in one day. Methinks Theo will be like a little caged animal after all that time cooped up!