Sessile baby, and other updates

A few months ago, someone pointed out to us an example of a child who was not receiving adequate stimulation and spending too much time in her crib by herself. A major point of evidence was, "[baby] is ten months old, and still isn't crawling!" This was delivered in a shocked sort of way: behold, the perils of negligent parenting!

Well, we now have a ten-month-old who still isn't crawling, either.

And no, he isn't walking, or making any progress towards that form of locomotion, either, as my dear parents cheerfully assume he must be doing.

And yes, we do take him out of his crib whenever he's not sleeping. (Granted, that can be a long time, as today Rip had two-and-three-quarter hour naps for both morning and afternoon naptimes, meaning that his total nap time for the day was 5.5 hrs.)

(Given that he spends much of his three-hour-awake chunks eating, and thus sitting on his bottom, there's not a huge amount of time for building huge muscles needed to heft his enormous 27-lb self about. It's hard being large.)

He is, however, starting to do more pulling himself along the ground (aka "army crawling") over the last few days, and his butt-scooting is getting more targeted and less random-walk-y... and he's making strides at being able to climb into the bathtub on his own, when anyone else has the audacity to try to take a bath without him. So, he's developing gross motor skills at his own pace.

I do think he'll progress to a point of mobility, and eventually even bipedality, ere too long (like, before kindergarten). All in good time. I'm not exactly following a dedicated exercise regime with him to try to get him to crawl ASAP, as acquaintances have suggested we urgently do, since I think he'll get there when he's ready. In the meantime, I am enjoying the lack of total mobility.

Edited to add: We had dear friends as houseguests for a week of delightful vacation, and one of our friends took great delight in building towers of blocks for our boys and also his son to crash down. When it was Rip's turn, he would build the blocks just out of reach to incentivize Rip's moving forward a bit -- something we've done many times, too. Rip gamely lunged forwards a bit a few times with our friend, then the next time the tower got built just a biiiit further off, and Rip instead reached for a long piece of railroad track lying on the floor, and used it to bludgeon the tower down without moving himself at all. "Points for creativity!" said our friend. Indeed!

Other things to that are great right now:

• Jolly is still cranking through about a bazillion "why?" questions a day. Consequently, we have been learning about why we have seasons and night/day and also weather patterns, which means that he's currently in a better place than many Harvard graduates.
• Rip Mammal-behavior has been cut down to three times a day, upon waking from the epic sleeping. This is agreeable to both of us. I have about a month worth of milk in our freezer that we can use to get to a year if we start weaning early, so I'm not very worried either way.
• Jolly and Rip have feedback loops of absolutely uncouth table manners that I find oddly charming, but haven't caught on video yet because I don't really want to encourage them. Today: instead of signalling that he was done with corn by putting it down, Rip lobbed his ear of corn across the table, then Jolly used very good shotput form to do the same with his own ear of corn. Cue uproarious laughter on all fronts. (Rip: Huh huh huh! J: HEEEE! Hee hee!)
• Rip has a tendency to touch things gingerly with one extended index finger first. Given that his hands are the size of mitts, it's a bit comical.
• Jolly is mastering number symbols (he's got 1-4 down, we're still working on 5 not being a g), and he's just started learning lowercase letters. He seems very undaunted by differences in font, though perceptive of them, which, as a font geek, makes my heart swell with pride. The b, p, d, q distinction just seems cruel to me, really. Jolly does a lot of asking, "but WHY is that the little Q? WHYYYY?" and I think I need to try to research some satisfactory answers, because right now I am sharing his bewilderment.
• Rip also just learned how to wave. His wave is a bit arm-flaily, a bit like one might expect him to be waving a handkerchief in farewell to a cruiseship or something. He is now waving at everything and anything. Hello, hallway!
• Jolly has started telling jokes. From having once heard the "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Why?" "To get to the other side!", he's branched out into telling his own jokes, which tend to involve variations along the lines of, "The rooster crossed the road! To get to the other side!" and "The chicken crossed the road to get to the COFFEE SHOP!" This is followed by laughing hysterically at his own joke as well as announcing to you that he had just told a joke.
• Jolly still really into puzzles. Rip now getting into putting things into other things, as well as taking things out of other things (e.g. books from the bookshelves). We're still working on the concept of putting the books back into the bookshelf -- it may be some time coming.
• I am so, so lucky to be the mother of two such fabulous boys.