My daughter is a crappy walker. I guess she’s trying to learn how to do it right, but c’mon. She can take several wobbly steps in a row, but she crashes all the time! Geez! Little things in the way, CRASH. Quick change of direction, CRASH. Trying to walk while carrying her pink blankie, step on the blankie, CRASH. I don’t know if she’s better at walking or piling herself up on the floor in a heap!

She started stepping independently almost two weeks ago. Now, she’s moving quick enough that she’s colliding into household objects out of my reach. Her cutie face has new red marks all the time, from the bashing it takes. Yesterday it was the vacuum and its attachments that caught her fall. Today already, the rough edge of a cardboard box scraped a new geometric design on her cheek. Who knows what she will fall into while I’m sitting here typing on the computer!

Have I made it clear that my kid has failed a lot, at this new skill she’s learning called walking?

It appears to me that if she was measuring her progress, at how much she’s failing, she might as well give up already!! Why wouldn’t she do that, I mean falling hurts. She could cause real damage to herself or to our floor full of pots and pans. This crashing thing may be too big to overcome and if she gave up now she could save herself a lot of bumps and bruises!

Crawling is just so much safer. Crawling is a sturdy and secure way to get around. Crawling is almost as good as walking, but without all the danger. I’m wondering why she can’t see all the benefits of the Conservative Crawlers Movement, becoming popular among children her age.

“Why Walk!” Is a great slogan!

I see the onesies printed with ‘Why Walk’ all around and being posted online by intellectual babies who have put real thought into their own well-being. When we crawl we’re cute and someone will pick us up if needed. It’s nice to be picked up and held. Those wobbly walkers don’t get nearly as much cuddling as a cute crawler. Their independence is arrogant and a rude way to treat those who’ve raised you this far, just running away, like a game of chase all the time.

There is so much wrong with walking, yet my daughter seems determined to do it anyway! Ugh!

I’m glad I’m not like her. When I fall down and fail, I really study it. I stew and ponder each moment of the whole event. I sometimes spend days or weeks mulling over a single failure that I’ve committed. Yup, I’m not like her at all. She seems to not even care that she crashed hard to the floor! She just gets right back up tries to walk again. Duh! You’re going to fall again I think to myself, and sure enough, down she goes for the hundredth time today.

I’m so much more mature and prudent than her, since I’m 36 years older. She should ask me how to deal with her failures, I could set her straight. I could tell her, that she needs to start mentally collecting them, and adding them together. If she could just inventory and categorize these crashes she could see patterns so that she could be sure to know that it will only happen again if she keeps trying. This would make her so much more educated than the other babies like her, who just keep trying and keep falling down, over and over and over again.

Yeah, someday hopefully when she can start to talk, I can converse with her about all the ways that she can avoid falling in life. I could tell her how to never feel any impact at all. She could stay away from banging against anything whatsoever. If I could just teach her, to never try, then she would see that she could never fail! How wonderful that would be!

Until I can really get that implanted into her personality, I guess she will probably continue on like this. Poor girl. I can’t believe it, but she seems to not even be fazed by the constant slip ups and smack downs. She does it at home, and in front of people in public. She has little falls and big wipeouts and everything in between, but she doesn’t seem to have the capacity for embarrassment. I hope that virtue grows soon, so it teaches her how wrong it is to look silly in front of others. Honestly, it almost looks like she doesn’t give a CRAP what other people think! OMG! LOL!

Well, it’s obvious that I have a lot to teach this little toddler about life. I’d better get to it. She is playing in the background and been racing 100 miles an hour. It’s like she never stops. She just goes and goes, almost relentlessly at pure play! It’s weird I know, but it appears that with her playing all the time, she’s improving by little tiny increments at everything she does. She’s not taking it seriously though, she’s all sillyness and squeals of laughter with her constantly experimenting behavior. It’s so childish!

Also, she tries to make everything a toy! It doesn’t matter what it is. She’s ‘reading’ books that she doesn’t know the word to. She ‘cooks’ with plastic blocks in a mixing bowl. She even makes a jungle gym out of the legs of our barstools. This girl has it all wrong. It’s like she’s having FUN all the time, no matter what!

I’m sorry to have to tell you this devastating news about my JoJo. Hopefully someday she will ‘grow up’ and be more like us adults with our safe and calculated cyclical repetitions. That’s the kind of life we can be proud of, day after day after day after day after day after day.

Please pray for me and my family. We will need that kind of help to get through this. Sometimes, when I watch her, being so rambunctious and carefree I’m tempted to act the same way! I hope to hold my ground, continuing to mull over all my past mistakes and not forgetting a one of them. It’s hard though. Joella’s spirit of adventure is really contagious. Please, please do what you can to learn from her frivolous follies today.

With all the (wink-wink) sincerity I can muster today 🙂 Crash yourself into a fantastic weekend!

Sincerely (really though)

-Daddy and JoJo