Friday, August 22, 2008

Jake the Climber


Jake has discovered the thrill of scaling the dining room chairs and then ascending to the next level, the table. On Tuesday Kara complained to me that no matter how many times she removed him, he kept returning to the dining room and pushing the chairs up to the table and leveraging himself back onto the table.

She tried pushing the chairs back away while he was on them, but that only forced him to take a diving leap--sometimes crashing to the floor--but he was still quite willing to come back for another try. No hard lessons learned.

On Wednesday Jake was still very much enjoying the game. He and Kara had some rare one-on-one time while Matt took Bentley and Viva to the zoo in the evening. Jake chose to use his mommy time climbing on the table. She phoned us so we could listen to him giggling in delight as he again and again used the chairs to reach the table. Such cheap entertainment!

Bentley climbed on the table once or twice when he was younger, but not determinedly like this. Viva has shown no interest in this particular activity. Yet.

Finally on Thursday I was treated to the Jake on the Table show. Kara brought the little ones over and it wasn't five minutes before Jake was on my dining room table and stood up and bumped his head on the hanging lamp. He didn't stand up again after that. I ran and grabbed the camera so I could get some shots for this blog post. Here they are:


Jake on the table.


Jake trying to get off the table.


Jake misjudging where the chairs are. (He didn't fall off.)


Jake struggling with the table cloth.

It was quite interesting watching him. He easily climbed on the table, but he wasn't able to climb back off. He went around and around the table trying to climb down on different chairs, but never feeling comfortable enough to complete the process. Eventually I took pity on him and lifted him down. He climbed back up once more and then lost interest in the game. He was off to steal gold fish from his sister. (More on that in a future post.)

Despite the joy it brings him, it's not really safe for him to climb on the table, so Kara wants to stop him from doing it. We gave her our sage advice. When she was little she loved this game, too, so we stored our kitchen chairs on the kitchen table. I'm not sure how long we had to do this (2 months? 6 months?), but it was long enough for us to remember this phase of life. Kara thinks our solution extreme. Well, for her sake I hope Jake isn't as stubborn as our child was.

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