Last week has been a whirlwind for the Smushter.  She decided that she wanted to crawl, to sit up, and to hold her own bottle before Friday.

The Worm gave me almost 9 months to prepare myself for his first crawl.  In fact, his first time putting four on the floor was on Christmas day in the year of his birth!  But before that, he had already found good stability in sitting upright.  Smushie, on the other hand, wasn’t interested in following big brother’s footsteps.  She (like most women I know) wants to do everything at once.  (I’m going to catch hell for that last sentence.)  Smush has decided to carve her own path…mainly by toppling over (face first, of course) into Legos, wooden train tracks, and Matchbox cars as well as by dragging her pot belly over everything else in her way.  A girlie girl she is not.  (But that’s ok.  With all the leg pulling, butt slapping, pile driving antics of her older sibling, she needs to be a bit rough and tumble to hold her own, or at least keep her body assembled.)

None of this is a problem.  I’m fine with her gaining mobility.  It just means that I’ve got to secure/confine/glue the baby to something before I can focus on anything else.  (It will also give me an opportunity to begin crate play pen training the little one.)

If “Miss Mochi Cheeks” continues on this rip-roaring path, I’m in trouble.  As if life isn’t already flying by, now I’ve got a baby girl who will be riding a bike next week and taking college entrance exams at the end of the month.  How do you tell a baby to slow down and smell the roses?  And that growing up will only get you one step closer to creaking joints, saggy butts, and incontinence.

I need time to collect my thoughts, jot them down, and reflect on the growth of my children.  It’s imperative for good blogging/documenting/recording.  Smushie doesn’t want any of that.  She’s plowing through infancy like Worm plows through the supermarket aisles, head down and as fast as the mind-body can move.

Smushie’s milestones last week really affected my subconscious, because I had a dream where Worm went straight from 2 to 16 in the blink of an eye and I couldn’t remember how it happened.  All of a sudden, he was a tall, lanky teenager asking for the car keys. I awoke distraught.  I can’t have that happen!

As Worm would say, “Mushie, listen me!” I need you to grow up gently.  So, I’m laying down some ground rules.  (Get it, ground rules?  Because you are crawling on the ground…ha ha…forget it.)  After every blog post I write, you will be allowed to learn one life skill.  Otherwise, the phases of your life be a blurry sludge of words and images in my head, some of which will never escape to see the white of paper.  I need you to progress in a leisurely fashion, otherwise my musings on your life will be brief and confusingly unintelligible.  Pretty please!!!!

There's Just No Stopping Her!

There’s Just No Stopping Her!