I've always told anyone who would listen that a baby's first six months are the easiest. Yes, there are the diapers and the night-feedings, but that's ALL.
There's no serious teething in those first blissful months, no baby food to make, no talking back, no fighting with other siblings, no begging for "just one more" episode of Dora the Explorer, no having to feel guilty about the cleanliness of the floor, because nobody is crawling around on it yet, and above all, no child-proofing!!
That's right, for me, the pre-ambulatory phase is the phase involving the less guilt.
Of course, there's always the "I-had-a-glass-or-two-of-wine-and-breast-fed-anyways" guilt or the "I-went-out-without-my-baby-for-an-entire-two-hours" guilt, but this is not the same as the "I'm-threatening-my-baby's-life" guilt that comes with knowing that now that your baby can move, all he wants to do is chew through live wires, chug down cleaning products, stick his fingers into exposed wall sockets and obstruct his airways by inhaling the older kids' tiny toys and that you should do something to ensure none of this happens.
As you may well imagine, my house is a death-trap for babies. Apart from a single broken-down old child-proofing lock guarding the cleaning products (that only seems to keep out my dear hubby), I've very little inclinations toward child-proofing (it's right up there on my list of to-do things, after cleaning the floor) and I've established a kind of natural selection model, with the most important lesson of survival being to stay out of my make-up.
My house is also full of animals (not all of them human). And anyone with a crawling baby and a pet knows that once babies get moving, they are inexorably drawn, by a powerful natural force of instinct, to the pet food bowls.
Of course, you know that wouldn't necessarily bother me much (we buy the fancy pet food, after all, and besides, it's so hard to feed the kids well), but it makes a MESS!
Forget live wires or the cleaning products, every time I turn around, baby M is happily rooting through the dog's food bowl and spilling it everywhere, leaving me to try to scoop only the food (and not the dirt from the floor) back into the dog bowl. The dog never helps, of course, because once she realizes that what's being thrown around by baby M is her food and not a tasty baby num-num, she wants nothing to do with it, so the dog food becomes the one thing the dog will never eat up off the floor and I do mean the ONE thing.
And as tedious as picking dog food up off the floor is, it's at least not as disgusting as having to fish a couple of (organic, but still) half-dissolved food pellets out of the stubbornly uncooperative baby's mouth. I don't know what it is about dog food, but all my kids ate it up like candy and probably still would if not for fear of my wrath.
But that's still not as bad as when Baby M is gleefully splish-splashing in the dog's water bowl, turning his caked-on crud into caked on mud.
But that's still not all, since once he's been caught and I've resorted to starving the dog by placing her food bowls out of reach, the baby, still wet from the water bowl, will move on to the gerbils and their particularly hateful mess-making.
I love the gerbils, I really do.
That being said, they stink.
And they make a mess.
They shred things and then toss the shreds, along with half their litter bed, right out of their cage. And my ambulatory baby has taken a liking to digesting his dog pellets by taking a nap in the gerbil droppings, which stick to his still-wet-from-the-water-bowl skin, along with the hemp litter.
Still, you'll say, at least all this keeps him out of death's way.
Yes, but, as I think I've already noted, it makes a MESS,
And all that is before lunch and the joys of the self-feeding baby, who's already stuffed full of dog pellets and thus considers home-made baby food an experiment in mess-making.
