Guppy - Scariest Army of One

(This post was originally written about 3 weeks ago for those of you keeping track of Guppy's development)

Guppy is at a stage that's somewhere between an infant and a toddler. I have no idea where the actual line is between the two. Some people define a toddler as "a child who is learning to walk". However, the toddler stage apparently extends to about age 3. I know that there's a lot to walking, but does it really take two years more than when the child first starts learning to walk? Others define it as a child between ages 1 and 2.5 or between ages 1 and 3.

It seems that no one can agree on when exactly infancy ends and toddlery (is that a word?) begins. Doesn't really matter. At this point, at eleven months old, I'd put Guppy into an in between stage that I'll call infoddler. For the last three weeks or so, he's started to take steps walking (the most we'd counted was 7 at once and it was only a couple times a day that he'd do it). Is that considered a toddler? Nope, again, I'm sticking to my guns and calling him an infoddler.

Lim went away for the weekend, crushing our record of being alone with each other, going from about 4 hours to 48 hours, and came back Sunday afternoon. Guppy seemed indifferent towards seeing her when she got home - something that I'm sure is a letdown for any parent. After a few hours, I started cooking dinner upstairs while Lim and Guppy went downstairs to play (we have a large finished basement that is perfect for someone just learning to roll/crawl/walk).

From upstairs, all I could hear were squeals of joy. Usually, this means that Guppy has accomplished something nefarius and wants us to know it. In this case though, I could also hear Lim saying, "Good job, Guppy!"

I went downstairs to investigate and found out that within an hour he had gone from a general ambivalence towards his mother and 7 steps at a time to a huge grin for Lim and as many steps as he could manage before hitting his equivalent of a land mine, attempting to traverse the room to his mom and then to elsewhere. The general steps he would follow would be:

*) Find vertical surface to pull self up
*) Walk forward, squealing, until tripping over something
*) Utter protest
*) Repeat steps 1 thorugh 3 until getting to Mom
*) Crawl/Walk to other side of room and begin again

Lim and I started talking about it and figured out one of the scariest scenarios possible. Imagine an army of infoddlers. Thousands of small creatures squealing their way towards you; arms held above their heads; hands holding toys in a death grip. And they're only in diapers decorated with Disney characters. How would you stop such a monstrosity? The only way would be with caltrops of toys. But no, that would just cause protests.

Don't believe me? Check the out the following video. The real scary part starts at around 20 second.