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When Everything is Everest

Anderson started walking at 7 months, and was a steady walker by 8 months. I credit his enormous thunder thighs, but when he's older we'll just tell him he was "advanced." By 12 months, he realized that walking was for chumps and decided to start running everywhere. Now, at 14 months, he's realized that running is very two dimensional, and he has his sights set on the toddler final frontier: climbing.

For a couple weeks now, he's been putting his feet on various objects (chairs, boxes, cats) and promptly tipping backward. He's almost always undeterred by these falls, of course, and within seconds is back on his feet clambering at whatever obstacle is in front of him.

I didn't really get it for a while. "You're too little to get onto the couch by yourself," I explained, quite rationally. He looked at me thoughtfully, then once again tipped backward in his attempt to scale the front of the couch. I wondered if I would have to invest in a helmet for him to have any hope of surviving the next year.

Sir Edmund Hillary famously said he climbed Mt. Everest "because it was there." And there, on my hands and knees next to my angry and determined baby, I realized that everything is Everest to a toddler. He's not going up the side of the couch and turning my hair gray just because he wants to sit higher, which is why getting carried to the destination doesn't satisfy him. He scrambles halfway up the side of the couch just because it is there. It's a challenge yet to be conquered.

A wonderful thing about kids is that watching them can give you remarkable clarity. We may have taught him how to say "giraffe" and how to eat without choking, but he teaches us about determination and exploration and priorities. We teach him how to survive, he teaches us how to live.

Now if he could just do that while sustaining fewer head wounds, we'd all be set.

Full post as published by Clever WoT on August 21, 2007 (boomark / email).