Almost a year

Sam turns one next Sunday. I know I haven't posted in a while. It's really hard to parent and write about parenting at the same time.
That's the thing that's most noticeably changed about my life in the last year. The availability of time. And the fact is, that when I get some down time from parenting, I'm not all that interested in using it to write about parenting.
I know there are people out there that wrap their entire lives around parenting. Frankly, they annoy the shit out of me. Always have; even before I became a parent. Now that I am one, I have even less tolerance for them than I did before. In the movie of Sam's life, I'm a support player. An important one to be sure, but it's his life, not mine. Wearing my role as a parent like it's some kind of badge of honor like I see people do... It seems like they're exploiting their kids to me. Like the purpose of their kids is to validate their own image of themselves as parent.
Anyhow, Sam is now capable of more self-amusement than before, so I have a little more time to do things like write about parenting.
In the last year we've had lots of progress, of course. What's interesting about it to me is how anti-climactic most of it has been.
We spent close to three months waiting for him to crawl. He spent a lot of time getting ready to do it. Up on all fours and rocking, or trying to move both hands at the same time and face-planting (more on face-planting in a moment). Kate and Megan (the nanny) started participating in an informal "crawl watch"
"Did he crawl today?"
"Almost"
"I hope he doesn't until this weekend so I don't miss it."
Like that.
I actually don't remember when he started crawling, because one day he wasn't and then he was. He got the hang of it all at once, and suddenly he was all over the place. And the kid motors. He can get to any unsafe thing that you didn't mitigate before you get there, no matter how far away from it he is when you realize you forgot about something.
Crawling has freed him to much more actively explore the world, as now he can get to anything that he needs to explore on his own.
Once he gets to it, Sam has two means of investigating what catches his attention. If it's small enough, he puts it in his mouth.
If it's too big for that, he slams his head into it.
He's slamming his head into stuff a lot.
He almost always has at least one facial bruise, and his record is three concurrently.
That's not true.
His record is three concurrent bruises and a paper cut on his nose that he got from waving a magazine or catalog too close to his face before trying to eat it.
He can also feed himself now.
Finger food that is. We still have to do the spoon feeding with him. We haven't tried giving him the spoon. But if we give him steamed vegetables, or slices of tofu, or crackers or whatever, he can feed it to himself.
Usually he has to kill it first. So he'll slam his carrot stick into the tray three or four good solid shots before shoving it into his mouth.
Clearly, he doesn't want the carrot to feel pain, so he's making certain that it's adequately stunned prior to eating.
He has six teeth showing, three up and three down. More are on the way, I'm certain.
When he smiles he sort of looks like Lou Gossett Jr's character in Enemy Mine. The one where he plays the lizard guy.
He bites.
Not aggressively as an act of combat, but exploratorily. Just to figure out what something is. To him, my ankle covered by a black sock is potentially a different thing than my ankle covered by a brown sock. Biting it clears all that up for him, apparently.
He likes girls.
A lot.
It's pretty funny actually. He's a tremendous flirt. Little girls in strollers or college age women who wait tables or women my age at the grocery store. He flirts incorrigibly. We're going to have to watch that. We'll probably have to have "The Talk" with him when he's, oh, five.
We've lowered his mattress one level so that he can't climb out when he stands up in his crib, but I'm beginning to suspect that we'll need to do it again soon. He's 30 inches long, or tall (I don't know when he switches from being long to tall, officially) and probably weighs about 25 pounds.
So, lot's of progress.
But...
He's waking up from his nap, so I have to go parent, and stop writing about it.
Later...