After months of scooting on his bottom, look who’s crawling!!
(Please forgive the high squeaky voices, Monkey’s gets that way when she is excited, and Otter really seems to like it when my voice closely resembles Minnie Mouse’s. I don’t know why, but he does.)

My little man is now mobile, and any thoughts of rest still clinging desperately to the dark corners of my mind have been obliterated. For example, I am here, in my office, blogging to you at 1 a.m. because there is no chance to sit down during the sane parts of the day.

However, I love watching him move around. He is so deliberate in where he places his hands and knees. It seems almost as though he has studied crawling, and has engineered the ideal manner in which to crawl, and is sticking to that!! I get to hear this little pat pat pat pat of his hands as he places them down. It is quickly becoming one of the soft background sounds of my day.

I love it!!

Otter was inspired to crawl at Susan’s the other day. We were there watching her make a Striped Bavarian Cream dessert (which she lovingly brought to me today!) and having a little coze. She has these little gears on her fridge that move, and we turned them on. All of a sudden Oliver went from playing with a toy in the middle of the kitchen floor to crawling across the room to the gears. It was amazing to watch!!

I guess all he needed was the right motivation.

Otter is a big baby activist. He has spoken out on behalf of the No Down Babies movement, the No More Bottles movement, the Hell No Mom Can’t Go movement, and the Anti-Baby Containment Devices movement. Frankly it has gotten challenging to keep up with all his political activities. (We do like to encourage a healthy interest in activism in this house, so we try.)

His latest cause is the No Separation Between Baby and Mommy movement (NSBBM). He is no longer contented with mere co-sleeping and night nursing. Now he has moved on to night snuggling. While I am more than pleased to snuggle the young man, I am a little upset that he will not stay asleep, unless he is snuggling me.

It starts about 4 or 5 a.m. (A time of night I prefer not acknowledge the existence of, but sadly am getting to know very intimately.)

Otter will stick his arms and legs straight out in front of him and roll toward me, making “eh eh eh” sounds while he searches for “the boob”. He will not deign to open his eyes. Once his hungry mouth has found it’s target, he will nurse contentedly until he falls back asleep.

At this point I will carefully remove him from my breast by pulling slightly away from him. This is when I used to be able to go back to sleep. Now however, this activity is met with opposition and strident protest.
“Eh eh eh” goes the baby, as he wiggles closer in an attempt to find “the boob” again. If it is not found soon, the “eh eh eh” will increase in volume until he is awake and crying, so I will capitulate, and offer it again, in the hopes of being able to go back to sleep sometime before 6 a.m. He will nurse for a few seconds and fall back asleep. That is, of course, until I try to extricate him from “the boob” once again.

Rinse, repeat.

If I am successful in removing him from the breast, he will snuggle up right next to me to sleep. This is nice, it is wonderful, except if I move at all, he will wake up. Also, I am usually right on the edge of the bed at this point, clinging for all I am worth to the mattress, having scooted over slightly each time I have removed him from my breast. (He also takes up a surprisingly large amount of bed real estate for such a tiny person.)

If I scoot him over, he will wake up.

If I move over to the other side of the bed, he will wake up.

If I get up, he will wake up.

It is too early to be up!! I want to sleep!

Argh!! I never thought I would be complaining about my children’s desire to snuggle, but I really want to jump up and down, stomp my feet, and scream “STOP TOUCHING ME!!”

I love co-sleeping, but I have to be able to sleep. It’s not called co-snuggling, or co-waking.

Any ideas of how I can continue to co-sleep, and yet still curb his increasing need to be my own personal fungus?

So there I was, securing the speaker cable from Otter’s grasping hands, insuring he would no longer be able to chew on it.

While I was doing so, he managed to get into a drawer in the dresser behind me. What did he pull out to chew on?

A packet of needles!!

Because of course he did.