The climber

Max at Pioneer Park, Nevada City, CA.

In the last few weeks, Max has become a reasonably competent crawler. Immediately after reaching this point, he decided crawling was passe' and started climbing everything he can find instead. This includes kitchen chairs, walls, unstable baskets, mommy and daddy, and any of the massive assortment of items littered on our floors. Given our house, he apparently decided climbing was a survival skill. We can also easily identify what he likes to climb. A good example might be a brightly colored soft toy box, with lots of grippy handles to use. This is what Max will ignore as he resolutely tries to put all his weight on a lead-lined, thin, glass cabinet filled with a collection of Medieval weaponry.

He's gotten pretty good at pulling himself to standing on lots of different furniture pieces. However, what goes up must come down (except, I guess, for rocket ships) and here the story gets ugly. For really the first time, Max can hurt himself, and he does it frequently. There's a variety of falls: The worst is when he spaces out and lets go of, say, the couch, falling straight back spread-eagled onto his head. If he falls straight down, he whacks his chin on the table on the way down. Even the wall isn't safe - he was on his knees moving his hands up the wall, but slipped and whacked his nose on the wall on the way down. None of these have happy endings. Max freezes into "I'm about to scream" face, and tries to cry but can't breathe. By this time, usually someone has picked him up and is hugging him. Soon, he gains enough composure to let out the biggest scream he can. At this point, he'll pretty much cry forever unless we distract him with, for example, a book.

What can we do? Yes, I know. Kids have been around for 700 billion years and they've survived this long. But when I hear the "thump" of his head on our hardwood floor (strand-woven bamboo - over 3 times harder than most wood!) and think "Hey, glad that wasn't my head!" then, well, we'd like to do something. We bought floor mats, which Max immediately crawls off of. We follow Max around, tensed like Charlie Sheen in "Platoon" for any impending disaster. We leave him in a safe enclosed play area, causing him to cry uncontrollably.

So, finally, we bought Max a helmet. Yes, scoff if you must, but Max comes from purebred nerd lineage. Some background: I surfed in Los Angeles, and for a while I was kinda cool. I'd have these conversations with other surfers:

Other surfer: Yo, whassup.
Me: Dude. Awesome waves.
Other surfer: Yeah man, it's been insane.
Me: Yeah, I know, man.

The other surfer was probably a computer systems admin, but that's besides the point. I was cool. I also whacked my head on the sand, on my surfboard, and finally, after getting nailed so hard in my jaw that I couldn't eat anything larger than a grape for a week (and hearing stories of other surfers with coral in their brain), I got a surfing helmet. It's the nerdiest headgear ever invented. No one ever talked to me again. But my helmet let me try stuff I'd be way too scared to try otherwise, so it helped my surfing.

Umm, where was I...so Max now has a helmet, as shown below, and better yet, he's too young to know we made him a baby nerd.




OK, perhaps there were some initial difficulties, but after some persistence, we got Max to tolerate it. And, finally, Max in action.