roll your own

when do babies begin to crawl? At seven or eight months old? Nine months? I don't know. My intrepid six month old isn't crawling yet, but he is covering a lot of space. Not long after he learned to roll from his front to his back, Daniel worked out that if he combined this new skill with his well practiced back to front manouvre, he could freak the living shit out of his mother by disappearing when she left him unsupervised for a nanosecond. I found him again, but not before a chilling 'What the fuck??!" coursed through my veins upon viewing the empty room that once contained my child. Dude's feet were poking out from under the sofa, and when I dragged him out, he was still clutching the toy he'd been chewing on when he was still flat on his back in the middle of the room. He's since disappeared several thousand times more, usually with a toy as an accomplice, and I've since sported the wild eyed look of a frantic mother at least that many times too. I thought I'd have a few more months of living with what amounted to, well, a log, basically. Something that stays put, you know? But I've got this intrepid little traveller with an amazing sense of direction. The kid doesn't just randomly roll and end up where fate takes him. No, he determines his own path, one that usually takes him to places I would never have guessed could house a child until his little socked feet sticking out tell me otherwise. So yea, he rolls. Everywhere. He's also become my yardstick for 'How much do I need to sweep the floor?'. Fortunely my carpet was ripped up last year and replaced with some very pedestrain, but way more hygenic, beige linoleum, so there's no daily struggle with dragging the stupid vacuum cleaner out of its very stupid and inconvenient storage area. The beige linoleum though, is the same colour as whatever the boy yarps up. The other night, I picked him up and put him in the hug-a-bub so we could wallk across the road to the video store. The tell tale smell wafting up from the boy's head, inches from my own nose, let me know that he had indeed, yarped, and that he had indeed, wiped it up with his hair. Peeyew. It was late, the store was beckoning, so I wiped off the lumps, dusted his head with lavender scented cornstarch, and popped a hat over the lot.

Ah yes, mothering at its finest.

Speaking of video stores, why do we stil call 'em video stores despite their trade these days being primarily DVD rentals?

Speaking of my video store, the second season OC DVDs came in the other day. I've been waiting for over six weeks for them. Actually, the store got a new set in because the ones that I'd been waiting all that time for still haven't been returned. Six weeks, man. I hate humans, I really do, which is a bit harsh considering it's only a DVD. Or six. But it's the principle of the thing, you know? This nimrod had been called several time a week (the people at the video store adore me, hence the barrage of phone calls to get me my damn OC fix) and been told, either directly or via an answering service that someone (me!) was waiting for the DVDs, so could they please bring the fucking things back. Christ. The moron still has them, by the way, and I just love that she's being charged $1.10 per DVD, per day. With six DVDs in the set, and with five and a half weeks of late fees owing, my pissiness at being made to wait that long has been tempered somewhat with knowing that shitfeatures' details have already gone to the debt collectors. Yeah! Three cheers for the second mortgage she's going to have to take out to pay for my long, drawn out wait!!

And he's awake now so there's yer update. Just quickly though - solids! Daniel is about to try some pumpkin (organic, steamed over pure water by my own delicate hand) for the very first time. We have no high chair, nor do we have any of those all encompassing quarantine suits that the people who clean up crime scenes wear, so wish us (and the beige lino) luck.