Mother's Curse

Let me introduce you to my son (and to my family and Brian's family, this might sound eerily familiar).  I know most of you already know him from following this blog, but every day a little bit more of his personality emerges. 

This is my son in his corral (cage is such a cold word).  This corral is filled with toys, cool letters and numbers on the floor, a bouncy chair, and his exersaucer.  However, what you see him doing here is what he has been doing almost every time I've put him in his corral this week.  He grabs on to the gates and then he...

...starts to cry.  He HATES being in the corral.  All he can think about is everything outside the corral.  Nothing in the corral is good enough, he wants to explore.

So, I've been "letting him out" for a little at a time.  He crawls around and when he gets close to the ant traps / cat food / garlic skin on the kitchen floor (oops) / etc, I pick him up and remove the offensive item.

But this gets exhausting.  And I get nothing else done.  So, this morning, after he ate his breakfast, I decided to try something different.  I picked up everything first and then I swept the floors (novel idea) to get any stray trash off.  I took Monkey out of his high chair and let him explore while I folded laundry.

He walked all around the loft and ended up at the front door (yes, that is our cable wire, but for some reason he is so over playing with that so don't worry about it).  He played there for a little while exploring everything.

He peered through the window and was rather enraptured with outside.

And then, he looked around and went back in his corral to play with his toys.  Yup, he had complete freedom and chose to go back in.

So, here is the morale of the story.  Outside the corral was the most interesting when he couldn't go there.  And then it was still interesting when there were things he couldn't touch.  But, once he was allowed to do everything it was no longer fun.

He is his mother's / father's son.