Don't Feed the Bears

Crawling has brought some of the fears we had expected. Oliver has found an outlet, has creeped towards the basement stairs in a nanosecond, and has taken an affinity to power cords.

But I wasn't prepared for just how much this kid was going to eat off the ground. Maybe it was our fault, placing puff cereal on the floor to encourage him to propel forward instead of backwards. But now, the tiniest things grab his attention. A single cat hair. A fabric fiber. Tiny pieces of plastic from his neb medicine ampules. It's as if every piece of lint was a shiny blinking object dispensing cheerios. "Pick me up! Eat me! Stuff as much in your mouth as you can before your Mommy sees you!"

He has a special hankering for paper. What once served as the cheapest toy in the world (it crinkles, changes shape and hey, we were going to recycle it anyway), now serves as Ollie's favorite snack. When envisioning a child-proofing plan, I did not include the task of putting paper up high and out of reach. I think he ate about 3 pages of a parenting magazine yesterday before I had realized it. Changing his diaper, I could have sworn that I saw a table of contents in his poo.

The next time you come visit our home, you'll know why we tied up our food and paper in sachels, strung-up and suspended from the ceiling.