Crazed Crawler II: Caged beast

The mission was simple, as made clear in 'Crazed Crawler I: Reign of Terror': Our rampaging baby, suddenly gifted with the ability to crawl everywhere with impossible speed and assurance, had to be stopped. So, yesterday, a desperate Mum and Pa combined this critical quest with their previous hope of purchasing a so-called 'Big Time Toy', something that the little fella could really get his teeth into (well, once his teeth emerged from seclusion) and engage with.

The solution then became obvious: A lightweight play pen that could corral Sonny's roaming instincts, but which would feature child-friendly features that he could have fun with. Within a day, we had made a lightning raid on the local Kiddy Palace and lugged home our new purchase, which Pa wasted no time assembling.


In the second photo above, you can see Sonny entranced by some of our new purchase's tactile play features (whirling, creaking, spinning, plastic "telephone", et cetera). What you don't see, unfortunately, is Sonny becoming bored within 30 minutes and howling the house down. He even began ramming his shoulder against the walls of the pen, which fortunately held - thereby saving us a furious trip to the Kiddy Palace demanding a refund.

It turned out that Sonny's hissy fit was partly attributable to hunger pangs. We've since established that, when on a full stomach, he's willing to spend a little while spinning and twisting before deciding this is all too silly for words and so begin yelling for attention. Since we can now safely keep him and his bawling at a distance, the play pen is inevitably on its way to becoming a sort of discipline shack. Soft-hearted Mum, though, has crawled in to spend some time there with the little fella, just so he'll have a warm and fuzzy feeling about the place too.

The tears are still flowing. The whole affair has even gotten us into thinking about how we adults are also caged, by our jobs, monetary obligations, habits and convention - yet are so used to it that it never occurs to us to stage a noisy protest (similar sentiments are expressed in 'Breaking the milk barrier'). At least babies are devoid of such conditioning: Theirs is as honest a response as can be imagined, stripped of even language and issuing as mere wordless cries. In the face of this, there's something tragic about deliberately crushing a child's curiosity, even temporarily: Something heartless and cold.

But, heck, it can be jolly convenient.