These shoes were made for walking

...not, as Lauren might have you believe, for eating.

When we last expressed dismay to the pediatrician about our apparent inability to keep up with Lauren's developmental pace, and how we found the difference in the 3.5 year old, who knows enough not to eat marbles or pencils, but does not know enough to keep them out of the reach of her sister, and the 8 (going on 9) month old, who is actively figuring out her world orally and kinetically, to be more than daunting, the woman laughed and said cheerfully:

"Well, the first one, you know, you worry about whether she is developing correctly and whether you are feeding her the right food and reading the right books and taking her to the right school and so on. The second one, you're just trying to keep alive."

To all you second borns out there, I know this sounds as though we parents don't worry about all that other stuff, but the truth is that what really happened is we experimented alot on your older sibling to find all that right stuff that we just practiced naturally on you, and that is why she is the way she is. So it goes both ways. Trust me.

In any event, I don't remember Sydney ever being so fascinated with, say, flushing the toilet or learning how to disembowel an entire roll of toilet paper, but I rather suspect that is because she was never allowed near the toilet or the toilet paper in the first place, whereas Lauren has a freer reign for lack of parental resources. Which leads us, her parents, to see an ever deeper side of babyhood; a far more complicated endeavor than people probably give it credit, and makes it a pity that none of us really have any memories that far back. What greater joy could there be than first discovering you can stand up on those two feet your were only recently trying to eat? What could be more fascinating than a helium balloon attached to a string? What greater disappointment than to finally find a choice morsel in the fact of a used tissue only to have it snatched away? .....well, maybe some things are best left to the far reaches of our memories, after all.

So far Lauren has both been kept alive and up with proper feeding and care and is growing into the cute babbling baby stage which is both endearing and way too short. Soon she'll substitute "dadadada" for "daddy" and will quit eating shoes in favor of wearing them. Just like her sister...only different.