I looked over at Lucas, and he was joyfully running up to me, holding a diaper. Then it hit me; he just said diaper! Lucas is at a wonderful age when he is starting to reveal all of the languages he has learned his whole life through talking. It seems odd at first to live with another human being who doesn’t know how to speak, but it becomes routine very quickly with children. Then as time goes on, communication starts happening through gestures, sounds, and finally, words.
I was really excited. I ran upstairs and told Diana that he had said diaper. She was also excited. As I made my way back down the stairs, I realized that Lucas wasn’t saying diaper as a noun; he was saying diaper as a verb.
Lucas was standing there with his pants down and a poopy diaper he had managed to take off in his hand, smiling up at me. “Dye puh,” he exclaimed at me.
I called Diana down, and together we got him cleaned up. She asked me, “how did you not sense that he was trying to tell you to change his diaper?” I didn’t have a good answer; I should have checked his diaper when the kid was holding a diaper.
I’ve been a parent for nine years. Lucas is my third child. I should have figured this one out. I’ll chalk this one up to being so proud of his use of words and his cuteness.
*****
There are some milestones parents dread. Lucas hit one of the big ones last week: he figured out how to climb out of his crib.
I started noticing in the morning that Lucas would come down and hang out with me as I was getting ready for work. I figured he must have cried, then Diana took him out of his crib and let him come downstairs. Nope, he was just jumping out of his crib, opening the door, and coming down.
It can be pretty scary to see a toddler climb out of a crib. The scale of it is pretty incredible. It’s like an adult dropping from the height of ten feet. Life-threatening? No, but you could hurt yourself depending on how you did it.
Ollie never learned how to climb out of his crib. He loved his crib. Ollie would wake up from a nap and just want to hang out there. Ethan was the opposite. He would try to get out of the crib immediately after waking up. I’m pretty sure that Lucas learned how to get out of the crib by watching Ethan, who would sometimes climb into Lucas’ crib to play with him.
Lucas’ new climbing skills mean that his crib is no longer a place where we can leave him and contain him. This has made some nap times and bedtimes more challenging, though he’s still doing a pretty good job of falling asleep.
Before I go to bed, I checked on my sons, and three nights this week, I found Lucas sleeping on the floor of his room next to his crib. Instead of trying to find Diana and me, he climbed out and decided to just settle on the floor. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but it was cute to see him there cuddled up with a bit of pillow.
Lucas is growing up, he’s no longer a baby, and the challenges are new every day, but make life different every day, and are oh so entertaining.
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