Parenting Lesson of the Day: Beware the Quiet Baby.
You might think that if your baby is playing quietly then all is well. No, no my misinformed friend. This is not the case.
You might think: "A quiet baby is a happy baby!". Well, that may be true, but happy and "all is well" do not necessarily coincide...
It is not new news that if your child is too quiet, they must be up to something. However, I did not think this applied to babies. Let me enlighten you: it does. My first experience with an all too quiet child was when I was fighting some horrific allergies a few weeks back. The baby was sitting on my lap, contentedly playing with probably some stuffed bug that sings, or a frog that ribbits, a book that crinkles, you know--baby stuff. I was probably on my laptop, most likely fertilizing some crops in Farmville. Then she got quiet. REALLY quiet. Perhaps because my head was in a fog from allergy medicines, or I was trying to become a "Sultan of Seeds" or "Lord of the Plow", I didn't look down at her for, I don't know, a few seconds? The damage was done. She had nabbed my box of tissues and had managed to pull out an enormous pile in front of her with one already becoming her mid-day snack. Like a summer's eve tornado, the storm came quickly and left quickly with an eerie silence, but left a trail of destruction for miles.
You would think I learned my lesson.
Skip forward a week or so. The allergies had passed. (Though, I'm still working on using up the pile of tissues she"freed" from the box...) My head should have been clearer, right? The baby was sitting next to me on the couch. We were playing again, I looked away, and--silence. I looked back. Maybe a second had passed. And she has grabbed my cell phone and begun picking at and sucking on the silicone cover. I didn't even know my cell phone was anywhere in a five foot radius! Baby-nado had struck again.
Ah, reader. You now think to yourself that she has learned her lesson from the tissue-twister and then the Baby-nado. Sure, she should have learned after the first time, but it was good she experienced the second storm to ensure that she never trusts the eerie baby silence again.
Wrong.
Skip forward in time to this evening. I was attempting to feed the baby her daily solid food regime of "Tastes-like-cardboard" rice and "Really?-I-didn't-know-vegetables-could-be-that- consistency" carrots. The baby scoffed at my rice after only a half spoonful (and that half spoonful she ended up spitting back out onto her face). I resigned and headed to the kitchen to prepare the carrots. She was content to play quietly in her high-chair. Of course kids are always content to "play quietly"! Duh! Playing quietly is universally acknowledged as the time when most kids get into trouble! I should realize by now as my figurative barns have already been leveled by Baby-nado twice before. So what happened?
The baby, in a matter of probably about a half a minute this time, somehow summoned my checkbook to her high-chair and stuffed it in her ricey mouth. Rice had already made its way in between the checks and adhered them to themselves. (Baby rice is sticky stuff.) So the next few checks I write are going to have baby's signature on them too. As I am writing this, I still have no idea how she got the checkbook...
The storm came and went so quickly. It was barely enough time to even process the fact that the baby was being extra quiet. But Baby-nado had plenty of time to leave a trail of destruction behind like acres of corn torn from the torrential wind of a twister.
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