Daredevilry

Andrew doesn't do anything halfway.

At birth, he came out screaming, peeing, pooping, and startling all at the same time. He's supposed to do those things, but nobody said he had to do them simultaneously.

Arms are two of the few body parts a baby can move purposefully (at least occasionally) at the beginning. So Andrew moved them all the time until he figured out how to move something else. He sometimes took a break when he was sleeping or having a movement of a different kind. Other than that, constant motion.

The kid ate for eleven straight months. Nobody dared give him a bottle without another full one standing by.

One could legitimately say the cited examples are on the involuntary end of the spectrum. So I've been wondering if his over-the-topness would continue once he had some say in the matter.

In a word, yes.

He rides the rocking horse at Gymboree like the horse insulted him. He makes the horse wonder why he came to work that day. Same with the rocking zebra ("doo-da!") at school. He managed to lift the base off the floor, which caused mild panic in me as I envisioned doo-da bucking him off and his little skull denting the tile floor.

Part of this behavior, I think, is due to his size and strength. The kid is bigger than most kids his age (than all kids his age, according to the growth charts) and seems correspondingly strong. And that old cliche is true: he doesn't know his own strength. He comes by it honestly; Grandpa is a very tall and strong guy who once pushed the oven light button and made the whole button panel fall into the guts of the oven.

But another part of this behavior, I fear the bigger part, is because Andrew is fearless. He comes by that honestly, too. Grandpa did a whole bunch of stuff when he was a kid that demonstrates a profound lack of fear. But, in Grandpa's case, it was also due to a profound lack of adult supervision, which is definitely NOT the case for Andrew.

The other day I read this article. Researchers found that kids with "poor fear conditioning" at three years old may be predisposed to commit serious crimes later in life. Nice.

Even if he runs head-on into traffic today, I figure the odds are stacked in Andrew's favor for the future: (A) he's only 19 months old and has some time to get some fear, and (B) his verrrrrrry risk-averse, non-crime-committing family members will work hard on keeping the kid out of the slammer.