Baby genius

I've been hesitant to write about Jonathan's latest accomplishment this week. Chris and I thought it was just happenstance at first. Plus, Liz tells me that the story about Jonathan saying "sleep" at three months makes us look like weird hypercompetitive delusional yuppie parents, which is the last thing we want. But this is now three times in the past week and we've moved past coincidence. So I will tell.

Jonathan loves his crib mobile more than just about anything. He lies there and looks and listens and laughs out loud. The mobile attaches to the foot end of his crib. There's a control box inside the crib and, for some reason, you have to hit the "on" button twice to make it work. Hitting it once makes a little red light go on, but nothing else.

Now, he's been migrating from the top to the bottom of the crib for a long time - there's nothing new there. Last Saturday morning, when I went in to get him, he was down there with his feet up against the mobile box - he'd turned the red light on with his feet. I said something like "Oh how cute, you want your music" and he grinned and flapped his arms (his morning "hello") and kicked the button again, turning on the mobile. Chris went to get him on Tuesday - mobile was going. Same thing again this morning. We've noticed that the first set of batteries lasted three months. The new set burned out in three weeks.

We're very proud of our little baby genius and also a little scared. We were counting on at least a year of being smarter than him. I'm thinking babyproofing is going to be a lot harder than getting some cabinet locks and outlet plugs. We're going to have to move into a giant padded cell to keep him safe. Maybe he can program the VCR so I won't have to miss "Lost" anymore.