What Am I Going To Do With That Boy?

I think the only thing I can do is pray. I pray that I can get that boy to the age of 2. When we get there, I'll pray for 3.

This child is absolutely fearless.

He has a bruise on his face from I don't even know what. He has a black eye from trying to climb on top of three paint cans that were stacked into a pyramid. Paint cans don't hold climbing babies. He has multiple scratches and scabs on his head in various places from all the falls and misjudgments made by new walkers.

I've been thinking of changing his name from LG to Chunky Monkey.

He would scale the entire house if I gave him the opportunity! I cannot keep him off of my kitchen table unless I take all the chairs and turn them over, legs up in the air. The fireplace is a continuous struggle as well; I have taken to piling toy bins up there so he doesn't have a square inch to occupy his chunky butt. The stairs are his Mecca.

But the worst is...the ladder.

I have been trying to remodel our entry hall (among other things) and need our ladder to complete the work. I have pulled him off the ladder many times, but usually I am right behind him, so it's no big deal. Yesterday he upped the annti.

I had the ladder in place and he was in the family room adjacent to the entry hall. I had a baricade constructed of a toy bin and Lula's art easel turned on its side, which had seemed to be effective at keeping him in the family room for the last thirty minutes. I needed to stop working on the entry to fix lunch, so I went to wash my hands in the nearby bathroom. I proceeded straight to the bathroom, washed and dried my hands efficiently, and immediately headed back toward the entry.

Then I saw him....on TOP of the six foot ladder!!! As if that weren't bad enough, he was holding the scissors I had been using to trim joint tape! I think my heart skipped a beat!

My first instinct was to run toward him and scoop him up into my arms, thereby snatching him from the dangerous fall that seemed imminent; but if you know anything about LG, you know that would have been a mistake. Surely he would have taken great joy in my obviuos panic and started bouncing up and down frantically---all the while squealing delightedly. This would have caused him to lose his balance and tumble to the ground at the speed of light cracking his head on every rung of the ladder on the way down and impaling himself with the scissors before I could take two steps.(Ok, so I'm a little dramatic...I was scared!) So I fought the urge and quietly. calmly. proceeded. SLOWLY. I tried not to make eye contact with him and to cover as much ground with the fewest steps possible before he figured out that I was moving.

I rescued my little daredevil successfully this time, but if that bathroom had been any further away from the ladder the story could have been very different. He would have seen me coming and attempted either a quick getaway or a happy dance, both of which would have probably resulted in a 911 call.

Chunky Monkey it is.