Adam: Lucky 13
Adam:
Your warranty has expired, but we’ve decided to keep you anyway.
This month’s report will be dominated by your reaching a major developmental milestone: final and dramatic success with the Bipedal Locomotion Project. This is no small thing. It is many months since you began your preliminary experiments in the area of gravitational physics. Then you added muscular development targeted at the propulsion-related areas, and fine motor skills were soon stirred in to the mix. It seems that all of your research and development over the last 13 months has been directed toward this goal. At times you seem to have wondered if it was all worth, and you certainly hedged your bets by investing heavily in alternative means of transport; your crawling is legendary for its speed and efficiency, but ultimately that skulking around so close to the ground was doomed to wear thin at the knees, so to speak.
On Christmas morning, just 378 days into the project, you hauled your body upright at your uncle’s knee, turned 80 degrees to your right, and took five steps across moderately heavy berber-style carpet, splashing down into your amazed father’s arms amid gales of applause from all observers present. You were in motion for approximately the same amount of time that Wilbur Wright spent airborne the first time he went up.
Like the Wright Brothers, you did not rest after your initial success, but have continued to apply yourself relentlessly to the Bipedal Locomotion Project. In the two days following your Christmas day success, you managed many more iterations of linked steps, maxing out at an amazing 31. (Analysis of this figure attributes it to pursuit of a kitty).
Though this walking thing’s success was by far the most momentous event of your 13th month, other areas merit mention. Your ways of playing have changed dramatically. Where before you were all about mayhem and destruction, in the last month you’ve become really interested in putting things together. You used to go nuts if anyone had the temerity to put one thing on top of another within your sight; now you spend much of your time stacking. You’ve gotten really good at putting small objects inside larger ones, and not just your mouth. Even the vexing shapes, those triangles, squares and stars that will only go through a similarly-shaped hole, can no longer deter you. This is partly because you are satisfied, indeed delighted with yourself, if you get the star just to sit crookedly in the square’s hole, and partly because your genuine success rate at this brain-teaser is surprisingly high and improving every day.
The stacking is really shaping up. One of your aunties gave you a set of nesting buckets for Christmas, and when put together in order they form a tower taller than you are. You are not so adept at manipulating them yet, but you can definitely put one on top of another — not that you would let anyone else get away with that. You are much more dextrous with the set of wooden discs your mama got you; they have little pegs on the top that allow you to pick them up daintily by pinching the pegs between your thumb and forefinger. When the disc’s hole drops down onto the peg of the disc below it, you do a little dance of joy and self-satisfaction, and gurgle with your own cleverness.
These little dances lead me to one of the reasons we haven’t taken many photographs in the last month. It’s becoming less and less about how you look, and more about what you do, and that is often daunting to capture in still pictures. The walking, though riotously successful, still has its Frankensteinian, robotic, and drunken hobo elements, and this stuff just doesn’t translate well to Flickr. Even as we root for you to master this important skill, we are already missing the old you.
Speaking of the old you, it seems that the hyperactivity, the extreme spazzery, I mentioned a few months ago was just a phase, and that you’ve grown out of it. Except when it comes to destroying your father’s attempts at stacked-bucket towers, you have calmed down remarkably, for which we are thankful.
So, Christmas. Even though you were around for Christmas 2004, you were pretty much just a gasping lamprey attached to your mother’s breast, so in a sense we can consider 2005 your first real Christmas. You spent it with your North American relations, playing with all of your cousins, which was about the most heart-warming thing we could ask for. They were very kind to you even when you were attempting to eat or destroy everything in your path. There were some tense moments when you thought you could prise a Thomas or a Salty from the clenched talons of your rolling-stock mentor, and you were easily distracted from the whole stocking/present-opening thing by all the crumpled paper. Among your gifts were a box of Kleenex® all for you to empty as quickly as you pleased, beguiled by that magic eternal popping-up; and a plastic bin of wooden clothespins, which might be your favorite toy ever. Santa must have corresponded with Dedek Mraz to have understood your tastes in entertainment so well.
I have to tell you, though, that the traveling for Christmas thing was hard on you; several days were required for you to adjust to the time difference, and then we turned around and did it to you again in reverse. You seemed to be happy to be back home after all the excitement of flying and Christmas and wrestling with your youngest Montana cousin, who’s nearly twice your age and way ahead of you on the Thomas the Tank Engine curve. Prediction: next time you two meet for a steel-cage deathmatch, you will crush him like a grape.
