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!).