Escaping the bed and other clues

Some of the most truly heart-stopping moments for us over the past year have been when Sonny has wriggled free of our grasp and done a dive from his cot or the bed we use as a changing station. Having no concept of fear, he would crawl right off the edge and topple sickeningly to the parquet.

It's a measure of his growing confidence that the little fella has learned how to escape beds and sofas in a more efficient way. He employs two methods. With the first, he reverses his stance and gingerly lowers himself feet-first with his front facing the chair or bed. He uses his arms to support himself. The second, of course, is the lazy route: If we are with him, he'll simply affix us with his best 'pleading' expression, raising his arms slightly in what we have come to recognise as his 'Pick me up, chop chop' signal.

It is in such small, incremental ways that we are reminded that Sonny is quickly gaining in motor skills, intelligence and awareness. Other clues include the way he has become increasingly skilled in picking up small objects, especially the raisins we strew on his high-chair to try and keep him from clambering out. He can pop them into his mouth at a fearsome rate, though he hasn't yet mastered holding a spoon and can only shovel corn flakes or porridge in flailing arcs. When we are bathing him, too, he has become irritatingly prone to reaching his arms out to grasp the nearest object (usually a just-washed milk bottle, since Pa bathes him on what was formerly our computer table and is now the 'Sonny paraphernalia storage centre'). Coupled with the little fella's tendency to splash and sploosh, this has led Mum to abandon bathing Sonny at the table altogether; she now does so in the bathroom. Yep, he's learnt to play and be playful.

Maybe, therefore, a fixation with the standard yardsticks of baby maturation (his first tooth, his first word et cetera) blinds us to the accelerating rate at which the little fella is blowing past other milestones. Less-spoken of ones, to be sure, but no less significant. If so, we are the ones who are trapped - if not on a sofa or a bed, then in the conventionalities of parenting.

It's time to escape.