So, Christmas.

Yes, Christmas with a 10-month old is fun.  I'm still not sure why we spent so much money on presents for him, as he spent more time playing with the paper they were wrapped in than playing with the actual toys.  There is one gift in particular, though, that he did seem to quite enjoy.  His grandparents bought him a walker.  No, this isn't one of those you see gobs of when visiting a nursing home, it's a 4 wheeled device that has handle bars for him to hold on to.  It's got a cartoon-ized dinosaur head that sings and roars while my son is walking with it. It only took a few minutes to assemble the thing and replace the dead batteries that it came with (I'm sure we paid a premium on the product for it to include batteries), and then the thing was ready to go.  We stood the boy up just behind the dinosaur's head, put his hands on the handle bars and pointed him towards the larger, emptier end of the living room, and off he went.  I think we gave him a new sense of empowerment.  The look on his face told it all: a grin as big as anything, eyes shining and full of possibilities.

Then he ran into the entertainment center.

It took us a minute to get him gathered back up, turn his dino around and get him re-situated behind it, then off he went again.  This time, though, he managed to let the thing get ahead of him.  Bless his little heart, he tried to hang on and catch up, but all he managed to do was hold on to the handle bars while he fell from feet to knees then face.

Through a bit of trial and error, he got the hang of it pretty well.  He would rumble all over the living room, running over the aftermath of the traditional Christmas gift-unwrapping frenzy and the occasional toe or dog, all the while making his own baby engine noises.

Thank the Lord we've got some years before the boy gets in control of anything with any real power.

All in all, Christmas was a lot of fun.  We got new board games, the boy got tons of new toys that may or may not hold his attention more than 2 and a half minutes at a time, the wife got the coat she's been dreaming of for months, and I got a monumental pile of stuff to figure out storage for.  It's been on the horizon for a while now, but I think that the baby-invasion of my man room is imminent.

Anybody (or their husband) need a new dirty-gross-dog-hair-covered-man-room-couch to take up space in their garage/man room/basement/game-room/shed/back yard?