was just put down for a nap 2 minutes ago

playing independently in my own room

just woke up – thankfully it’s 9:20!

spent all day yesterday practicing climbing

Tristan gained a level in climbing yesterday.

He can climb onto our couch (the tall, recliny one), he can climb onto our bed if he uses items around it for leverage (we showed him how), and now I’m really terrified he’ll be climbing out of his bed before we’re quite finished with the babyproofing augmentations. He occasionally would try to climb onto things before, but it turned from an occasional event to every moment I turned around yesterday.

We got a month unlimited pass to Bounce A Rama, and of course, Tristan didn’t especially enjoy it yesterday. Of course, the big bouncer arena thingie in the back with the balls that we usually spend time in was down. But this brings our paid-for-entertainment passes to: Great America 2010, Children’s Museum most or all of 2010, and Bounce A Rama for January 2010. I’m thinking that with this climbing addiction, we will need to make haste on the Gymboree classes (or find a good tree) so that he finds an outlet for climbing that is less annoying than removing himself from a crib.

We’re almost finished making Tristan’s room into a place of little trouble. We put thumbscrew track locks on all of the sliding glass doors, so little toes are spared the grinding death. We also removed the huge armoire from Tristan’s tiny room and replaced it with a bookshelf that looked fairly small and feeble out here with our huge wooden furniture, and then used child-safety straps to secure it to the wall. We also finally have a lock on our master bathroom cabinets, so I can put a few things in there that are never meant for children and be assured that they are safe from his paws. One of the awesome things about Tristan is that he really respects the locks – after he realized something’s not budging, he gives up quickly, and then when it is NOT locked and should be, he tries to lock it! There’s a video of him re-locking a kitchen cabinet that we have installed the lock on but keep things like Tupperware containers in – I try to keep it unlocked but every time Tristan opens it, he reengages the lock, closes it, and walks away, satisfied.

Tristan seems to be tapering down on his open-close obsession.. but only slightly. At some point recently, he decided that he was rather interested in up and down, open and closed, etc. This means that if you stand in the open refrigerator trying to look for food, he will try to close the door, but at least now you can guide him to keep it open by giving cues to open and close it. This is one step up from him automatically shoving the door shut on you. Laundry last night was impossible, though. We have a front-loading washer next to a very similar-looking dryer, and Tristan could not let me keep both of the doors open at the same time (thankfully, his dad came and got him at that point!).

I don’t know if he will protest given his history, and we’re not going to be strict about maintaining this yet, but we did not give Tristan a SINGLE bottle today! I am so pleased that he’s willing to drink from the sippy cups and behave reasonably well while doing so. He has a bit of a playful spilling urge, but he finds that getting caught spilling loses him the possession of the cup for a while.

I’m asleep, so my mommy is working on this stuff for me!

* I took Tristan to a DD’s Discounts (just like Ross) and we found some plush pillows. Tristan leaned back from his carrier into the bin of pillows to snuggle them. I carried one of the pillows around and had him lean back into it to snuggle on command. I regret not having photographs of that moment.

* We’ve been going to the park lately to play, pseudo-organizing playgroups. For the record, I am sick of the back and forth that is involved with that, so I am going to find another solution that involves posting this stuff on the web. But it’s been sort of fortunate that we’ve gone alone-ish, because Tristan likes to walk off by himself and he needs to be followed when he walks 1/4 mile away without looking back.

* We’re planning to get a pass to Bounce A Rama and also still have to enroll in Gymboree. I’ll probably look into The Little Gym, too, since there’s one a bike ride away and Gymboree is about 15 miles away.

* The urge to climb is coming out very strongly in this one. We’ll need to strategize for Crib Escapism very soon. He’s not technically tall enough to pull it off and I haven’t seen him try (we have a video monitor) but it will be somewhat dangerous for him if he succeeds before we’ve strategized. For the record, strategy involves making stairs harder to access, blocking off his closet door so he can’t open and close it onto his toe, and securing any furniture he could climb or be crushed by in an earthquake to the wall.

* Speaking of earthquakes, there was another one while we were at the park – didn’t feel a damn thing! I was on the toilet for the first one, so James had the fun of strategizing for Tristan’s earthquake protection.

* As far as the climbing goes, one of Tristan’s pastimes is becoming climbing onto the couch, but he’s not that good at it yet. A lot of kids can do so earlier, but we have the Huge Reclining Couch and it’s also on a tile floor, so I don’t really want him pitching backward and landing on his head. I am sure within a week he’ll be doing it safely. (I am very amused when I hear about babies just learning to open doors, as he has been opening and closing our doors proficiently since we moved into here just shortly after he hit one year.)

* We’re almost done with those blasted molars but there’s half of one still to go. The diaper rash of doom that seems to accompany molar teething is back, and it hurt Tristan so badly that we’ve bathed in the morning two days in a row rather than try to wipe his butt.

A lot of new pictures and videos added!

Just had a magnitude 4.1, centered 6 miles east of us:

http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc71336726.html

Sort of felt like someone drove into the side of our place.  Stuff rattled a little bit, I yoinked Tristan out of his high chair (next to a bookshelf and the curio with all the glass dragons) and a few seconds after it started, it was done.    The last one we had here was far more noticable [4.6?  4.8?  – somewhere in there – I guess the logarithmic scale makes sense, there.