Halfway down the Danube

Single Parent

Claudia is in the US for a few days, so I'm a single parent this week.

The baby-sitter comes around 8:30. Alan and David wake up around 6:00. So I'm definitely getting some time with my children.

And fairly intense time it is too. For instance, this morning...

...Alan went into the bathroom while I was dressing David, and turned on the water in the bathtub. I looked inside, and he was playing with a cup: filling it from the bathtub faucet, emptying it into the bathtub. Fill, empty. Peaceful and harmless. So I went back to dressing David: onesie, shirt, jeans, socks.

Then I put David down and trotted downstairs -- shutting the baby gate at the top of the stairs -- to make a bottle. When I came back, David had crawled into the bathroom; I could hear him in there, with Alan, laughing. Peaceful and harmless, I thought to myself, so nice when they play together and took the opportunity to trot into the bedroom and pull some clothes on...

...and then I thought: laughing?

Trotted back and looked in the bathroom. David was sitting on the floor. Alan was still filling the cup... and emptying it over David's head. The entire bathroom floor was under water. David was drenched to the skin, all his clothes sopping -- onesie, shirt, jeans socks. Both of them were laughing with absolute delight.

Oh, and: the Fontana man showed up at the gate a few minutes later, with this week's bill for drinking water. (I drink Bucharest tap water, but I'm the only one. So we have a water cooler.) When I went out to talk to him, David was in the living room, gnawing thoughtfully on a Lego. So I thought it would be OK to step outside for a minute or so. And it wasn't longer than that...

...but it was still long enough for David to drop the Lego, crawl out of the living room to the stairs, and crawl all the way up the stairs to the top. He's been trying to do that for a couple of weeks now, but we spoilsport parents have been preventing it, because we're a couple of cringing cowardly killjoys who can't get past the idea that our baby might fall down the (tall, steep) stairs and, like, die or something. So he very reasonably waited until I went outside. And then he must have crawled over at top speed, and just gone up those stairs like a rocket.

Okay, I admit it: I applauded. After I had flown up the stairs to where he was wobbling on the top step.

A day and a half down. Five days to go.

We'll see.

Posted by douglas at May 5, 2004 11:19 AM