Lydia Log: The Great Unpacker

Nearly one year old now, Lydia has made some rather significant advances in her development recently. While she's been able to pull herself to standing for quite sometime now, only recently have we thought to place some kind of wheeled cart-type object in front of her and have her push it around. One flash of parental brilliance later, and Lydia is routinely giving a bear and a mouse wheeled hippo rides across the kitchen floor. So, she is that much closer to walking on her own, which is a "game-changer" akin to Naomi parachuting onto the island with pictures of Desmond and Penny, which to the best of my knowledge has yet to be explained, and with only one season left, may not be at all. Yikes!

Right. Also, while Lydia has yet to speak any actual words, she has been communicating louder, and more frequently. Independent, she no longer needs constant hovering supervision and entertainment from us big people. She'll pull back the flip-flaps on her books, and practice turning pages, and roll around on her giant stuffed animals (which looks ridiculously fun), and open and close cupboard doors repeatedly, and...

...pull things out of their rightful spot on shelves or in drawers and place them on the floor. And by "place" I mean "throw". Sometimes, if her itch for mess-making has not been met, but the drawer or shelf has been emptied, she'll even put stuff back... just to remove it again. If her dresser drawer is open even by the tiniest amount, if you can maybe make out the slightest sliver of a shadow, guaranteed she'll spot it before you and make a mad dash, intent on spreading its contents all over the floor. If Pierre Maguire were an engineer, he would say that she is the "personification of entropy". And, like most baby-related things, this would be somewhat irritating if it weren't carried out with such cute concentration and enthusiasm. Now if we can just figure out how to have her put things back - something I know my parents struggled with for 15 years or so.