Status Report

So it’s been awhile. Let’s get you up to date.

Jimmy has taken his first shuffles as he learns to crawl.

He is also starting to wave goodbye, say Mama and Dada, and generally terrorize everything lower than three feet off the ground. His clinginess to me has been exacerbated lately (I’m guessing) by teething — he cut one bottom tooth and is working on pushing out it’s next-door neighbor. You can see his first tooth in the photo at right.

We took him to his first baseball game — Orioles v. Tigers — and he had a blast watching all the people and chewing on the seats. Currently, his favorite things to do include playing with his stacking rings and cups, banging on daddy’s laptop, and grabbing the dogs’ faces.

He is not so excited about sleeping on his own or being more than six inches away from his mama. We are working on these things. I am ready, at this point, to lengthen the tether, especially because I can’t take a three-minute shower without him screaming bloody murder while trying to claw his way out of his play pen or away from his poor heartbroken daddy to get to me. First of all, my legs are getting really hairy. More importantly, it’s not good for Jimmy to unravel every time I walk out of the room.

The interesting part is that Jimmy does fabulously when I am not home. He is overwhelmingly happy and playful when I’m not around. But as soon as I walk in the door, both at home and at school, it’s tears and furious scrambling  — by all his limited means — toward me. I don’t know if I’ve somehow created this (admittedly very lovable) monster or if it’s just a phase. If it is a phase, I’m wondering if my attempts to ameliorate the behavior (distracting him with a toy rather than picking him up, comforting him in his crib rather than on my chest) are totally pointless or if we can still chalk them up as “character building.”

It all feels like a giant experiment. I just hope the all the parental fumbling I’m doing doesn’t err on the side of emotional scarring. As I write that I realize it sounds ridiculous and I’m probably doing alright.