That Fresh Pine Scent
This year, mostly due to nasty snow and ice, Zane and I drove down the hill to the cut-it-yourself tree farm to get our tree. Instead of sitting and watching from a carriage like last year (or laying on the ground) he got to walk around the trees and point at random ones, saying “wooooaaaaoooowwwaaaa” and so forth until we decided on a good one. Since he likes to smell things now it was fun to watch him in the backseat beside the tree, sniffing and staring and probably wondering why there was a giant plant sitting where his mom normally sat.
Speaking of sitting, Zane is trying out a few new techniques to go down stairs and one of them is sitting on a stair and then skootching his butt forward until he falls/sits on the next stair down. The stairs, which he taught himself to go up/down at an early age, have been a real dilemma for him lately. I don’t know what’s up, but he complains when the kid gate to the stairs is open and then even more so if you shut it. His drop, turn around, and crawl backwards to the stairs started getting further and further away, sometimes he’s down the hall over twelve feet away and you know that’s not going to end well. Most of the time he gives up and whines, unable to make it the last foot to the top of the stairs. If you set him down on the top stair then he can go down no problem.
I think what’s happening is he’s trying to work out how WE go down the stairs and his imagination gets the better of him when he gets near the stairs and thinks about how he might copy us and the impossibility of it all. Lately he’s even tried standing a bit while on the stairs. I’m not sure if he’s ready for that. I’m certainly not.
I believe it’s a matter of perspective. He started to get near the stairs and look down them. He would back up (while standing) to the hallway wall opposite the stairs and cry. I would coax him towards me (standing a few steps down), but he would have none of that. I had to lean out and take his hands and walk him down the stairs so that he was facing front ways.
But, it was getting worse in that during the coaxing stage he’d take off down the hall complaining incredulous that i wanted him to do such a dangerous maneuver. I’d have to pursue and then hold his hands while i turned around to back down the stairs. That was a bit more awkward for me.
A few days ago, i tried helping him go down face first but on his bum. I found out that Daddy and he had already been working on that. Today, he was making sound effects while going down. kind of a high pitched revving before his butt would slide and then go thumping down. That was VERY cute!
But now he wants to go up and down the lower stairs (fewer stairs in that set) over and over. We do that for a while, but i just get too bored. There’s TONS to do in the family room. Who wants to watch someone else going up and down stairs? yawn
— Faith · 17 December 08 · #