Cute Boy and the Mommy

Since I've spent the past few entries detailing Lautje's impressive troublemaking capabilities, I thought I'd take a break, stop harassing him, and post a couple of reminders of why we spoil him rotten. How can we stay irritated at him for something so trivial as waking up at 2am and wanting to play when he snuggles up next to us and smiles like that?

Visit to the Oma and Opa

Not very long ago , Lautje and his mother stopped in to pay a visit on the Oma and Opa. As you can see from the photo below, the Oma's balcony (otherwise known as "Lautje paradise") is simply stocked full of plants that Lautje can tear apart, uproot, and generally destroy without great difficulty (but with great enjoyment). And, of course, being a grandmother, even after the countless hours that she has spent nurturing and tending to her plants, the Oma still allows Lautje to occasionally destroy one. If that isn't a sign of love, then I don't know what is.While hanging out on his balcony, Lautje discovered one of his Mommy's old toys, with which he was endlessly fascinated. Apparently, he kept looking at the Mommy with an expression along the lines of "I can't believe you guys actually played with stuff like that. Mommy, there's no plastic!"
But, like they say, sometimes old technology is still the best technology, because Lautje loved it...

Hook 'em Horns

We've had the giant stuffed Bevo for some months now (thanks Granny!!!!), but he'd always sat in the corner and Lautje had never really noticed him. Or maybe in Lautje's world, a giant stuffed Longhorn in a football jersey is completely normal. Who knows? Well, we decided to change that, so we put Bevo in the middle of the floor one day to see how Lautje would react. As you can see in the first photo, he was a little cautious at first, wondering what this thing was. Or, a second interpretation might be that he was waiting for someone to hike the ball so he could go tackle Bevo. It's hard to tell...After some moments of circling around, Lautje made his way over, and started inspecting Bevo's hair, with which he became quite fascinated, as can be seen in the second photo.
Finally, Lautje decided to get up close to Bevo and have a nice look. After having an amicable chat, they became quite good friends, I think...

Exploring the Tea Table

Since becoming mobile, Lautje has spent many of his hours of freedom on the floor exploring every nook and cranny of the apartment, looking for things he's not allowed to have and that we forgot to hide. The other morning, as I was babysitting and generally trying to keep him out of trouble, for no apparent reason, he decided to climb literally into the tea table. It was cute, entertaining, and completely illogical, so I decided to take a few photos, one of which can be seen directly below.Well, as I was happily snapping away, laughing, and generally congratulating myself on my good luck, I completely failed think through the logic of the situation. Lautje, being my son, is normally lazy, and only does things if there is a significant incentive to be gained (knowledge, trouble to cause, something new to see, etc...). It wasn't until I took the photo below that I realized why he'd climbed into the table. See if you can spot it...
The cord hanging down behind his head. For some reason (probably that we never let him have them to play with), Lautje is uncontrollably drawn to electrical cables. And even though he was distracted by something else briefly in this photo, he soon regained his focus and almost beat me to it. Alas, his mean father took the cord away, which probably caused untold amounts of psychological damage that he'll have to deal with later on in life...

The Nightly Ritual

So, a typical evening in the life of Lautje involves trying to convince him that he should go to sleep. Sometimes, with the proper persuasion, he does so rather easily. Other nights, irrespective of what we do, he is wide awake. After 30 minutes of trying to coax him to sleep, we give up and take a break, putting him in his crib, hoping he gets the idea. This first stage can be seen in the top photo: resignation at his plight as he stares through the crib bars like a man imprisoned.
The second stage generally involves Lautje attempting a prison break. He grabs hold of the top rung and begins to pull himself up as much as possible. Luckily for us, he's still a substantial distance from being able to manage the trick (though the day is coming sooner than we would like...). At the end, he has to settle for simply hanging on to the top rung and looking at us pitifully, in the hopes that we'll rescue him, as can be seen in the second photo.

The third, and final stage, is somewhat less endearing than the first two. After being ignored by his horrible parents, left to suffer alone and uncared for, his patience finally snaps and he lets us know in no uncertain terms that our little parental vacation is hereby over and that we must liberate him immediately, uniting him with his toys on the living room floor (or better yet, carry him around until he feels that we've sufficiently atoned for our sins). As you can see in the final photo, this stage involves just a wee bit of noise...

Off-road Crawling

Took a series of photos the other day detailing Lautje's developing ability to crawl. He still hasn't quite figured out how to integrate the legs, but he's more than made up for that deficiency with his off-road abilities. As you can see in this series of photos, when he wants to get somewhere, and finds an obstacle in his way, he simply crawls over the obstacle. Even when that obstacle is his mother...