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My baby, who learned to walk and took unsure steps around the house, has been replaced by a dude who doesn’t know how to walk at all– he just runs full-tilt to get to wherever it is he needs to go.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.

(You should probably turn your volume down at the beginning of this– I get pretty high-pitched.)

I love how they don’t bend their knees yet, and stick their arms out for balance. When he’s walking around the house, I often watch him and just go, “Braaaains. BRRRRRAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNSSSSS.” I work from home with a barely verbal child. It’s easy to entertain me.

He’s gotten a lot better at it since then; my favorite is when he walks while drinking from his sippy cup, because he looks like a recalcitrant drunk. Which he is. Because we fill his sippy with gin.