It Turns Out Our Baby Won’t Be A Slothful Mush After All
I’ve written before how I was worried my son Dmitri would never be able to sit up on his own, let alone crawl. No matter how hard my wife and I tried to motivate him to sit up or crawl, he’d just sit there and stare at us. “You want this toy, Dmitri? Come get it!” He’d give us a look that said, “No, I’m fine without that toy. I’ll just lie here on my back until you inevitably bring the toy back to me or I grow uninterested in it and decide staring at the ceiling is the most amazing activity in the world.”
I, in particular, was worried we’d be doing everything for our slothful son until he was an adult. We’d be pushing him in a giant stroller (or more likely a wheelbarrow) all the way up to his wedding when we’d wheel him up to the altar and dump him at the feet of his new wife for her to take up the responsibility of pushing around the giant stroller. Fortunately, all my worries were for naught.
The worst part about getting parenting news from the Internet is reading how by a certain age, a baby should be doing X, Y, and Z. As it turns out, kids are all different, and they develop at their own pace. At 7 months, Dmitri still wasn’t really sitting up or crawling. At 9 months, he was doing both. At 10 months, he’s cruising around our living room hanging onto the furniture for support. Soon he’ll be walking. I’d like to take credit for Dmitri’s sudden developmental burst, but it’s not like my wife and I really did anything. One day he’s a mush lying on his back; the next he’s sitting up and crawling around.
The moral of the story is, I’ve stopped worrying about when Dmitri will reach certain milestones and started just living in the moment. Stressing out about when he achieves certain milestones is pointless. What matters is that he’s happy, healthy, and growing. There’s no rush, little guy. Take you’re time. Your mom and dad know you’re gonna get to wherever it is you want to go. Except behind the couch where the power strip is because that’s super dangerous, and we really need to enact a better countermeasure to prevent you from reaching that thing.
Well, at least while you’re a baby.
When you’re old enough, I’m sure your mom and I will ask you to reach back there and plug in our phone chargers because we’ll be old and creaky, and bending down will hurt our backs. That’s assuming we still have phone chargers. It might all be wireless charging by then. The more likely scenario is instead of fighting about access to the power strip, we’ll be fighting about a motorcycle. You can’t ride one because it’s dangerous, okay? I don’t care if you got an invitation from that cool bandit gang. As long as you’re living under me and your mom’s corrugated metal roof in the underground shanty town hidden from the evil robot overlords, you have to do what we say. So what if the cool bandit gang makes fun of you because you go on bandit raids while sitting in one of those sidecars that totally makes you feel emasculated? That kind of ridicule builds character. Heck, in 20 years when we’re all plugged in as batteries into the robot overlords’ power grid, you’ll look back and laugh on the fact that you ever wanted a motorcycle in the first place.
