The first father-son activity

So before I go any further, I would like to confirm the presence of a tooth in Max's mouth. It's the front bottom right one and it's just up past the gum. Ever since it broke through, Max has gone back to sleeping well (yay).

Saturday morning, Max and I shared our first organized father-son activity. Well, it wasn't intended just for fathers and sons, but for parents and their babies. A few weeks ago I had signed Max up for parent and tot swimming time at the local pool (a nice 15 minute walk away) and the first class was Saturday. As it turns out, I think that because it's "physical activity", most dads think this is the perfect thing to do with their babies and still look relatively manly. So of the 10 pairs in my group, 9 of the parents were male. Just maybe though, this is moms' opportunity to kick the kid out of the house (and tell him to take the baby) to enjoy a nice, quiet, relaxing weekend day by herself. Either way, lots of dads. And, uh, as for those dads wanting to do something manly with their babies...it turns out that there's a ceiling to the amount of manliness exhibitable while singing Alice the Camel and Five Monkeys. Suckers.

It was nice doing something with other babies too. Max is the only baby I've spent time around in the last long while, so I'm not really aware of the different shapes and sizes babies come in. The babies in my class are all in about a 6-month age band. Some are a lot larger than Max and a lot had way bigger eyes...but a couple were also of the petite variety. A couple of the babies cried most of the time while some were giggling and splashing a lot. Others were ambivalent.

So, how did Max fare? The first few minutes went well, swooshing him back and forth in the water and helping him do jumps in off the side of the pool. However, he started rubbing his eyes shortly thereafter (boy, was he tired!) which accomplished little more than the introduction of chlorinated water into his eyes. Which made him cry and drink some water. Which made him cry. So pretty much once he realized how tired he still was, everything kind of went downhill. Even the part where I plopped him in a perfect crawling position on a flutterboard (images of dogs at the Westminster having their briskets checked came to mind) in order to whip him around the pool as if wakeboarding behind a motorboat. Man, who wouldn't love that?? I don't think I had the opportunity to sort out whether he enjoyed the whole thing or not. Hopefully, next time he won't be so zonked that he falls asleep before even leaving the pool building (although it was a beautiful day so we enjoyed a walk through the neighbourhood).

So back to that crawling position on the flutterboard. This was particularly funny to me because the only time we've ever been able to set him up in a nice all-fours was when his Auntie L did it once and then he chose to simultaneous lift his right hand and left leg and crash down to the ground. So he is certainly not a crawler...although the extreme friction on the flutterboard allowed him to hold the crawl pose longer than normal. Cool.

If I were to try to describe Max's mobility, it would be kind of like an army crawl: arms go forward, hands grab ground and drag body without help of legs. Repeat. I've taken a video to show you what it looks like. He takes a little while to get going but stick with the video. It's worth it: