Baby steps

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, among the flurry of family reunion face stuffing, Colin and I watched our baby learn to crawl. Again, the most mundane and predictable of developments seems at the same time miraculous and profoundly life changing.

We used to be able to put little Caleb on the kitchen floor, turn around and start cooking dinner, knowing we could look back and see him just where we left him giggling and waving his spoon at us. In this way Caleb also watched football with dad, sat with a look of rapt attention as we debated politics, and seemed to genuinely enjoy being a lone audience for mom’s impromptu living room dance performances. This made us feel like we could do all kinds of activities together as a family – even if Caleb was trapped in the activity by his immobility. He seemed happy at least.

But all this has changed with his newfound portability. He’s no longer an unwitting bystander to our lives. He’s exploring the world for himself and it’s fascinating to watch him express his interests. Apparently this whole time he’s wanted to flip the pages of stray notebooks, pull books off the shelves and fondle the door stop instead of watching mom pirouette. Who knew?

Instead of being drawn to the brightly colored toys designed with presumable years of child development research, Caleb (like a lot of babies I’m sure) is magnetized to all the non-toys in the periphery of our house. And the more dangerous the more alluring. I swear he’d go directly to the jagged staple in a pile of stuffed animals. So, we have to step up our vigilance. From nothing to something.

But extra vigilance notwithstanding, it’s a joy to watch him find corners of the house previously unknown to him. The other day something enticed him to crawl under the kitchen table. Under the kitchen table may as well be Narnia or the moon as far as Caleb is concerned. It’s been there in front of him this whole time, but he’s never been able to get there before. And now he can go whenever he wants. I can’t even comprehend the magnitude of this change for him. For us, it would be like suddenly learning to fly.

And babyhood is like this all the time: going from total incomprehension of human sounds to understanding, from inability let your desires be known to communicating through speech and sign, from immobility to freedom of movement. It really blows your mind when you think about. Maybe that’s why we can’t remember our lives as babies. Our minds have been blown.