Friday, 28th July 2006.

Legs, bums and opposable thumbs

A few weeks ago, Emily expressed a mild sense of annoyance that Josh hadn't done anything new for a while. Watching him develop is great fun but after mastering crawling and then pulling himself up, he seemed to reach a temporary hiatus of sorts, apparently associated more with laziness than an inability to do anything. Walking was a theoretical possibility, but why bother when crawling was faster and Daddy can pick you up whenever you want? I can empathise with this: I think if most people had the option of an enormous, twenty-foot giant taking them to the supermarket or home from the pub, very few of us would actually walk anywhere.

You're anxious to view your child as your own and avoid comparisons with other children. Nonetheless it's difficult to avoid falling into the trap of competitive parents: that of comparing your child's abilities to those of his peers (i.e. your friends' kids) and wondering why he's unable to speak / swim / paint by numbers. There's a fine line between pushy parent and neglectful parent - the one who is overly concerned about his child's development versus the one who doesn't interact enough. Similarly, you're equally likely to revel in your own family triumphs (in private of course), typically by singling out the child of someone you don't really like very much, and generally with the words "Stephen hasn't managed to do that yet!". You do this simply because you figure they're probably doing the same thing, and therefore it doesn't matter.

In any event, if Josh's progress had slowed for a while, it seems to have come on in leaps and bounds over the past month. Actually, 'leaps and bounds' is probably the wrong choice of words. Taking great strides' is more appropriate. All right, little ones. Toddling ones, to be precise. After spending six months crawling everywhere, Josh has realised that not only is walking easy and quite fun, but it actually enables him to get somewhere as fast (if not faster) than crawling, once his speed is up. He's been able to do it for a while, but the actual transition from fifty per cent walking to about eighty five per cent occurred, Emily tells me, on Tuesday, when he realised that all his ante-natal friends were doing it. You don't like to think of children that young as experiencing peer pressure, but it obviously happens. At least it was something constructive, rather than having him take up smoking.

It was genuinely wonderful watching him learn: gentle progression from sliding along caterpillar-like to a fast, rhythmic crawl (which I have to admit I'm going to miss quite a lot - it reminded me of Alien 3) to the pulling-yourself-up phase (assisting objects included chairs, the bed, Mummy's legs, and coffee tables containing mugs of steaming liquid). And then those final, blissful steps along the carpet, the two of us standing nearby - one counting steps, the other ready to catch him if he fell. The other week he managed thirty-two in a church in rural Yorkshire, and another eight running. Part of the problem has been a desire to run before he can walk, in a quite literal sense. A sign on the church door read "Ye are treading where the saints have trod", which made me grin.

It may be sweet, but unfortunately the desire to move about extends beyond a few steps across the lawn: I'm hoping that it's just a weather-related passing phase, but this week he's also developed a tendency to wake up obscenely early in the morning, and it seems the only thing that makes him happy at this point (apart from the reassuring familiarity of Mummy's nipple) is to crawl around on the bed. This largely entails sitting on my face, elbowing my ribcage or sticking his finger into my eye. He can, at least, work out how to climb off the end of the bed without falling down, but he doesn't actually have any real desire to do this, despite our constant reassurances that there are toys on the other side of the room, or even (on occasion) the odd game of 'fetch', whereupon his cuddly monkey (surgically attached all night, ignored as soon as he wakes up) is hurled into the door frame in the hopes that he'll go and retrieve it, leaving us to untangle the duvet.

And I do wish he'd keep still when I'm changing him. Lying down and wriggling the way he does is symptomatic of someone who would rather be doing something else - every second that you spend on your changing mat is time that could be spent chasing the cat, or eating the grass in the garden. I'll sing to him, and we've tried giving him toys or mobiles, with some success, but when he's in the mood for dancing there is not a distraction on this planet that's going to keep him still. Predictably, the wriggling factor is increased along with the contents of his nappy - i.e. the more faeces he's deposited, the more he's determined to put his hand in it or (better still) rub it all along the changing table. If the hand gets down to his exposed bottom then that's it: it's all over his ankles, legs, face, clothing, and usually all over me as well. I've found that the best way of preventing a faecal disaster, if he's in a particularly wriggly mood, is to grab the poor child's arms and legs in one hand while I wipe with the other. He lies there like a trussed chicken and screams blue murder, but at least the bathroom stays relatively clean.

Joshua's newly-discovered skill of walking is also of paramount importance in his ongoing game of 'Short Attention Syndrome', or 'Guess My Mischief' to use its alternative title. Said game consists of child sitting playing, quite happily, in a corner of whatever room you happen to occupy at the time. All of a sudden, completely unprompted, he will get up and immediately slink off to another area of the house. The goal, of course, is to get you to follow him. Just how long you can stay wherever you are without following him is dependent on a) how comfortable you were, and b) your sense of hearing. I generally tend to leave it until I hear the first crash; that's when I know he's in the middle of doing something he shouldn't be.

As you'd guess, that happens quite a lot. People seem to describe this phase as "being into everything", but it wasn't until I was a parent that I realised precisely what that meant. And to be honest, it's not entirely accurate: what it *should* be referred to is "being into everything that you're not supposed to have". This means that you can put Joshua in a room full of toys with a butcher's knife in the inconspicuous corner of a dining table, way out of sight and out of reach, and take bets that he'll go for the knife before he's been in there thirty seconds. (No, of course we haven't tested that theory.) Nothing is sacred anymore: the cat's water dish doubles as a finger bowl, the apricots in the vegetable rack are mauled and nibbled before Mummy can get a look in, and we no longer need the shredder - we just leave confidential paperwork strewn across the floor and then he takes care of the rest.

A lot of this is harmless, and the stuff that isn't can be avoided with simple preventative measures: child locks on the video cabinet, or moving the water dish out of the way whenever he's headed for the kitchen. However, certain things are off-limits, and we're currently trying to impart this knowledge to our son. This is less easy than it sounds, primarily because while he now understands the meaning of the word 'no' (or according to the books he should, anyway) getting him to actually obey you is a completely different kettle of fish. The other day we saw him heading for the drinks cabinet (which is hidden behind a curtain, I should add) for the umpteenth time, emerging with a huge grin on his face and a bottle of Grenadine in his left hand. Reprimands had no effect (unless you count turning round with more grins and an expression that said "I'm over here, what are you gonna do?" as an effect) so we put back the bottle and brought him away, whereupon he promptly crawled off again. The fourth time it happened I said "Joshua, NO!" in a suitably loud and assertive voice, and then gave his hand a slap - not hard, but hard enough to reiterate that he wasn't supposed to do it. Cue another grin - and almost immediately he began to clap his hands together with great enthusiasm, whereupon I gave up, and fetched a couple of glasses so that Mummy and Daddy could drink the Grenadine.

Josh's favourite habit, however, is pulling out CDs. I can live with that. Never mind the fact that I spent all of Holy Week 2004 amalgamating them in alphabetical order, and then another week earlier this year reordering and reclassifying them so that we knew exactly where things were. I know it's anal, but I take great pride in being as anal as possible, so I don't particularly care. What surprises me was the speed at which I adapted to having them jumbled up: I think it was having to replace them in the storage tower for the seventeenth time in the space of a week that pushed me over that particular edge. There comes a point where you no longer care if your Divine Comedy albums are arranged precisely chronologically, or the folk compendium is stacked from CD1 to CD3 going downwards, or that Kate Rusby comes *before* Show of Hands and *not* after it. You're more concerned with getting them back on the shelves before someone treads on them, and given that it's a multitasking thing (i.e. something you do in the thirty seconds you have before running back to turn off the bath taps) you tend to get a little less obsessive about ordering and classification. I will admit that I spent fifteen minutes on Tuesday evening sorting out Jimmy Hendrix, Billy Joel and Elton John, but in my defence I spent most of that period on hold to BT, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

It's nearly always the towers in the hall: one either side of the bookcase. The left one contains folk and C-D in our rock / pop files, and the right one contains our modest collection of dance albums and all the cover CDs I've collected off Q and Mojo over the years. The tower's design means they're easy to insert and easy to take out, which is presumably why he does it with such alarming regularity. Unfortunately he can only reach the bottom two thirds of the tower, leaving the upper third rather top-heavy, which means that a happy evening removing CDs and chucking them on the floor can be brought to an abrupt end when gravity kicks in. You know that this has happened when you're beavering away in the study and you hear the sound of a crash outside: cue the sight of the tower lying on the floor, suddenly empty, with Joshua lying beside it, generally upset. Whereupon one of us picks him up and cuddles him while the other one starts to clear up the mess. He keeps away for the towers for a while after that: generally at least an hour or so, after which the whole process starts again: you'll be picking them up and putting them back in while he'll be pulling them out, creating a neverending cycle of tedium that can only be broken by death. I sound like a bad parent. I'm not, honest. I know you have to watch them all the time, but it's not an easy task. The principle is to keep anything he could damage (or, specifically, anything he could use to damage himself) out of the way, and see what happens next.

If Josh refuses to learn from the toppling tower fiasco (generally he likes knocking things over, except it seems when they fall on him) he has made one evolutionary development that startles me. Yesterday morning I found - as per usual - a pile of CDs by the kitchen door, two leaning against the back of the dehumidifier and one down behind the bookcase, while Em recovered several from the laundry basket (along with a sponge and a shoe). But what was particularly disconcerting about this particular rummage was that one of the CDs was missing its inlay, which was lying beside it, slightly crumpled. Now, it's theoretically possible that it slipped out of the case on the way out of the tower, but extremely unlikely: given that the sleeveless box was lying next to it, I don't think it would be rash to assume that Joshua has managed to work out how to remove CD inlays.

This is quite staggering, really, because I sure as hell can't do it. The CD inlay is one of the most problematic and fiddly tests of manual dexterity since flipping beer mats (something else I'm no good at). What the Compact Disc brings in terms of sound quality it lacks in terms of user-friendliness: as well as actually opening the case (forefinger underneath, thumb on the side) you've got to prise the disc off its spindle without bending it too much, and then - well, let me hand over to Giles Smith in 'Lost in Music':

"And then there were those tacky plastic boxes, with their push-together fastenings and hinges. Tricky, too. I know people even know who own large quantities of CDs but who have yet to master the art of opening them. (As a rule, any approach that involves use of the nails under the right-hand edge is flirting with disaster in the shape of a possible popper rupture up at the hinge-end. I myself go for a left-hand dominant, two-thumb manoeuvre, which was about eighteen months in development. The left hand is spanned across the front of the disc with the little finger clamped firmly against the spine low down, the thumb parallel with it, working at the opening edge. Meanwhile the right-hand thumb, cupped round from the back in a mostly supporting role at the top edge, woggles the back free of the front.)

"As for the booklet, if it's an effort to extract the thing (you've got somehow to slip it out from *under* the semicircular retaining tabs while getting it *over* the nobbles that hold the lid shut) then this is as nothing compared with getting it back in again, which requires the combined skills of a watchmaker and a seamstress. (I would suggest rotating the open case ninety degrees clockwise and easing the booklet upwards with both thumbs from the bottom but, to be honest, I'm fallible here.) All highly unsatisfactory."

You get the idea. If ever there was a device that should be by its very nature intrinsically childproof, the CD case is it. And here's my son, who at the age of just over a year has managed to figure it out. Either it was sheer coincidence (which I'm willing to concede that it might be, but don't spoil my fun by telling me that) or his fingers are beginning to develop faster than the rest of him. Which leads me to wonder if I might be able to use him for something, preferably financial: perhaps an evening class, or at the very least a handy guide to household maintenance told from the point of view of a baby (with appropriate diagrams).

If this were a Warner Brothers cartoon I'd have had large dollar signs spring up beneath my eyelids by now, accompanied by the sound of a cash register. Even without the special effects, Em and I still think we could be onto a winner - on a small scale, at least initially, before the 'BABY GENIUS' headlines go national and we start to get onto the cover of Time magazine and then, eventually, Josh gets his own reality TV show (think The Apprentice, only with nappies). And it's with a heavy heart that I realise the irony of our situation: leaving him to rummage around all the music towers and tearing the dust covers off my Bill Bryson collection has not, it seems, been without its advantages. Now if we could just keep him away from the Grenadine...