Boys are different

Sometimes I think my 11 month old son Joey has a genetic make-up closer to that of a tank than his sister. Sure, they look similar as brothers and sisters tend to do and after an initial period of Miss 2 pounding the crap out of her newborn brother at every opportunity, they get on great. (If being friends with a piece of precision military equipment were possible.)

Over Christmas, we were away at Granny and Grandad’s house in Auckland and their highchair is different to ours. Our son in his wisdom figured that if he slid down through the highchair, he could get out the bottom of it and be off. He was discovered after about 10 seconds of backs turned with just his hands visible holding the tray, his head and torso hidden from view somewhere about where his bum should have been and his legs and feet kicking freely below. The scary thing about this is that there was no noise, no crying, this was part of his plan. He knew exactly what he was doing. Now, we never forget to strap him in.

If you've been to Auckland Museum recently, you may have seen the T-Rex Exhibition on the second floor. Our son wanted to get down and crawl so I tried an experiment. Let's see how far he can go...
He started outside the entrance to the T-Rex and made a beeline for the stairs. Up he went, pausing briefly to say hi to people he passed, then cracking up at his friendliness, he carried on. Four flights of stairs later, he was on the third floor of Auckland museum and halfway through the Vietnam section of the Hall of Memories.
At this point, enough was enough, time was getting on and I scooped him up to take him back down to the family who were just briefing the search parties. Reunited with his family he struggled to get down from my arms as they do and bugger me if he didn’t head straight for the stairs to do it again!

Back in Wellington and as I write this, he's in bed after a morning of carnage. At one point, he fell head first into his block box with only a grunt of displeasure at having being upended and he's sporting a scratch on each side of his face. These scratches were administered by two different cats and to be fair to the cats, the boy had it coming.

This I'm assured, is boys and it's great. We all like a bit of spunk and fire in an individual, I just hope his care-to-the-wind attitude has eased a little by the time he learns to drive my car.

-Dave Smart