Warning: This post contains 50 percent of your recommended daily parental chitchat as well as 200 percent of your recommended daily nerd content!
Once your kid starts walking, finding ways to burn off all that excess energy tends to take a very high priority. Doubly so for my little Armand Z. Pogue, who at 14 months is a shaky walker but a highly athletic climber. He can’t walk unaided more than four or five steps at a time, but he climbs out of his crib if given half a chance. This, from a kid who was in full leg casts five months ago. Hooray for modern medicine. (Actually, I tend to think the casts – which corrected a case of clubfoot he was born with – made him MORE mobile. With a couple of pounds of plaster dragging him down and unable to flex his knees, he learned to get REALLY resourceful REALLY fast. Now that his feet are straightened out and there’s no more casts, he has lots of creativity to burn.)
I’ve been researching options for both in-home and outside play centers. It’s amazing just what you can get for kids these days, such as a huge wood medieval-style castle (for the bargain price of $9,100) to a playset appropriately called the Metropolis ($39,000!), which dwarfs most city-park-scale playgrounds. This is before we get into the many ways you can decorate a kid’s bunk bed to be a full play center, complete with bridges and slides, for a few thousand bucks. (And rest assured I’ll be going to the List for the best contractors for these things.)
Of course, you just never know what’s going to attract a toddler’s attention. Armand has plenty of toys, and he gets a fair amount of use out of all of them, but half the time he’ll ignore the little maze of play tunnels we got for his birthday and instead joyfully yank tissues out of a box, one after another, making a little squeak of delight every time one pops out and the next comes after it. If we’re not careful we can go through half a pack in thirty seconds.
Remember what I said about climbing creativity? Turns out this kid’s got serious upper arm strength as well. Not long ago I caught him pushing around a camp cooler – two or three times his size, mind you – trying to get it up against the gate so he could climb into the kitchen. Dealing with Armand is like the advice offered in “Doctor Who” not long ago for coping with alien critters: “Don’t look away, don’t turn your back, and whatever you do, DON’T BLINK.”
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