It’s weird. I had a baby, and he was adorable. He rolled around and was generally awesome. Recently, however, I’ve had trouble finding him. Instead, there’s this dude who runs around my house all day and tries to climb in drawers. He subsists on nothing but fruit and soy milk, and if you take your eyes off of him, next thing you know, he’s climbed the stairs, climbed onto the headboard of your room, and has the cordless phone to his ear, saying, “he-lloooo,” in kind of an annoyed fashion– as if he has a lot of important business to attend to, and the person at the other end of the phone is wasting his precious time by not telling him what he needs to know.

You guys, I think this dude may have eaten my baby.

My baby, who learned to walk and took unsure steps around the house, has been replaced by a dude who doesn’t know how to walk at all– he just runs full-tilt to get to wherever it is he needs to go. He races around on giant hams for feet that slap on the ground like a fat guy doing a belly flop.

My baby wouldn’t stay still for two seconds, but this dude will cuddle with me on the couch and give me big hugs that go on forever. My baby would stare at me blankly if I asked for a kiss, but this dude will lean in and go, “mmmmmmm- muah!” and kind of launch his face in my general direction.

We had to baby-proof the old house, because my baby had a death wish. This dude likes to figure out how things work and helped his daddy put together a grill yesterday.

He calmly tried to figure out how everything worked, while daddy put things on backwards and lost parts. The dude also made sure that everything was working properly, and that Luke checked his work.

Each new word he says and each new skill he learns is replacing the baby I fell in love with with a boy who never ceases to fascinate and amaze me. It’s an interesting tradeoff. He won’t sit still in restaurants anymore, but he’s always waiting at the door for me when I come home, and squeals, “mommy!” like he hasn’t seen me in ages. My dude is pretty great.

Our household has been wracked by illness pretty much for a month straight. It got so bad that last week, Cooper was only able to go to school one day. He’s been losing weight, sleeping all the time, and producing some amazing colors of snot. Finally, I had enough and I said, “hey sickness. You’re a jerk, and you’re not going to beat us.”

We just moved into a place with a fenced in backyard, so I’ve been determined to take advantage of this as much as humanly possible. One of the first things I did, was buy my water-loving baby a pool, which he is obsessed with. The second is to garden. Luke is container-gardening some tomatos, we’ve topsy-turvied some peppers, and I’ve planted seeds for an herb garden. This works out for Cooper in many ways– the best of which is the use of the hose, aka his new best friend.

Sure, you can go spend 30 bucks on an inflatable blowfish pool at Target, but all a kid really needs is the hose.

Summertime!

Last year, we went to the zoo, and Cooper stared at the animals with a confused look on his face.

This year, we went over to my mom’s house and had a potluck. The weather was beautiful and we spent the whole day on her back porch. At some point, we broke out the bubbles, and it Blew. Coopers. Mind.

Sure, he never quite understood that the bubbles weren’t for eating, as is evidenced by the fact that he spent a great deal of time standing in front of them with his tongue out, but he quickly found the joy in trying to catch them.

Luckily, since I dropped my old iPhone in the toilet, I have a 3GS, so I was able to take video of Cooper’s revelation.

I’m glad we were outside, because his glee was deafening.

By the end of the day, Cooper was hopped up on the fruit snacks my mom filled his Easter basket with, and had dumped an entire cup of water on himself. He was stripped down to his diaper, exhausted, and looked like he had just been through a war. All in all, it was a successful afternoon.

Looking a little dazed and confused on his first day of school

In addition to all of the b5media drama, there have been a lot of other changes going on around here the past few weeks. Luke started a new job two weeks ago, I started a new day job one week ago, and Cooper started daycare. So basically, everyone’s schedules have drastically changed, and none of us has any idea which way is up at any given time.

The whole job thing happened really quickly, so it was very fortunate that I was able to find a daycare for Cooper that didn’t creep me out. I had toured a few places over the summer, and although they were nice (and in one case, very expensive), there was something that depressed me about each of them. Neither was a place I wanted to send my child all day.

Luckily, we found one that the three of us felt good about: it was clean, the teachers seemed competent, and it has a good curriculum. Cooper has been going three days a week for the past few weeks, and he seems to be adjusting pretty well to the new environment. He’s even adjusted to the part of it that completely boggles my mind: the sleeping arrangements.

Cooper’s room is made up of kids from about 13-20 months old, so these are definitely kids who aren’t old enough to be considered pre-schoolers. In fact, I doubt that any have graduated into a big-kid bed. However, at this place, the babies take naps not in cribs, but on mats. Little naptime mats, which are common in pre-k and kindergarten classrooms, are being used for kids who have just started walking. How does that even work?

Cooper’s a nut. He flings himself around his crib when he sleeps, and I’ll often go in to check on him, only to find a foot sticking out between the bars, or a tuft of hair, or both of his arms. Yet somehow, he manages to just go lie down on the floor and sleep for like two hours. This honestly defies all physics and logic to me. Despite the fact that I get daily reports that say he sleeps, I still can’t wrap my head around it.

What I can wrap my head around? The illnesses that we’ve been passing back and forth for the past two weeks. Cooper caught a pretty bad stomach bug, of which I had a milder version. Then he brought home a cold that affected both Luke and me, with the worst of it landing on my first day of work. Then, Cooper ended up with a 104 degree temperature and his first-ever ear infection, which he, never one to do anything half-assed, made a double. So, two infected ears, snot, diarrhea, and a jacket sent to the cleaners after a spectacular Pedialyte and banana vomiting incident. So basically, February? LIVIN’ THE DREAM, BABY!

He's still pretty cute even with snot pouring down his face

I’ve flown with Cooper several times. While we’ve had a few dicey situations, overall he’s pretty good on a plane. I know all the tricks in order to assure success: plenty of food, drink, toys and other distractions. However, when I unexpectedly had to go to Florida the other week alone with a now-walking Cooper, it was a whole new world.

Matt Logelin must be some sort of crazy voodoo magician, because holy Christ, traveling with a mobile child is an entirely new level of stress that I was wholly unprepared for. I mean, yes, I was logistically prepared, and I knew the fact that Cooper was busy cutting three molars may complicate matters, but what I didn’t expect? What I didn’t see coming? Was lining up for our flight and having Cooper running away from me. To the point where I couldn’t see him. In a busy international airport. And then I died.

Cooper ran out of the gate area and was almost in the main terminal, when passengers started alerting me to where he was. We ended up catching him, but anyone who has ever interrupted a baby on a quest for freedom can probably guess what happened next: screaming, thrashing and crying were all on the menu, and lasted, unabated, until we sat down in our seats. Why my completely full flight stayed completely full after that is completely beyond me. I would have assumed that at least half of them would have said, “not. Fucking. Worth. It.” and hightailed it in the opposite direction.

During the flight itself, it was a constant game of, “do you want some blueberries? Would you like to play with the container? Let’s read a book. Let’s play with Scout. No, you can’t get down. Let’s go to the front of the plane to change your diaper. It’s occupied and I can’t wait up here? Let’s go to the back of the plane to wait for the only bathroom with a changing table to free up. Let’s go back to the front of the plane and change your diaper. Rock, rock, rock. Sleep.

Yes, the only reason I didn’t just dissolve Kate Gosselin-style over Georgia is because at the halfway mark, Cooper passed out. Not only that, but he stayed asleep for the rest of the flight, even allowing me to read a little bit. I snapped this picture as a reminder that even though we’re trapped in a tin can, hurtling through the sky, and my heart rate has been somewhere around 200 for the past two hours, he really is still my snuggly, adorable little boy. Until we landed and he refused to take a nap for the next five days. But that’s a different story.