A picture is worth a thousand words

Well, I don't know about "worth", but I do know that this picture says a LOT of things.

1. Stuck! Haha. Huggyface is stuck. Also evident by his cries for help (which I found TOTALLY amusing).  He can't get down.
2. Persistent. He still finds those steps enticing, and he's not giving up on them any time soon.
3. Experience. He has appeared to learn something, as he is stuck on only the first step. He has chosen to not go up any further. While this lesson, post-leg breaking (oh yeah, I forgot to mention the leg breaking story, I'll have to share that. Sorry, it's been busy.) took some time, he has learned that the steps are dangerous. At first he kept trying to climb them. Now, he will only go up 2 max, and then he stops. looks around, waits for mama. Even if there's a sibling egging him on to go up, he stays. Good boy. Usually he can get down himself. I hesitate to teach him how to turn around and go down backwards, but I probably need to do that anyway.
4. We  r e a l l y  need to repaint. Both the riser, and the door. The walls just plain old need paint. I do have 3 colors painted on the wall, just out of sight, testing colors. I couldn't decide. (None of them are the right fit.) (Also, the door doesn't look that bad on the other side. The paint had been ?stripped, though it still looks, uh, rustic.) If you've never been to my house, you should know that when we bought it, it was trashed and mostly gutted. We figured, newly married and without children, that we'd have plenty of time to work on it. Well, that ended when we found out we were expecting our first, and we hadn't even moved in yet. Pregnancy is a push to get things done. Babies are a reason things don't get done. Hence... unpainted walls in the stairway, 5 babies later. C'est la vie. And there's lots of "vie" around here. ;)
5. Wow. The knees in that outfit are really dirty. And, he's worn a hole in them from crawling.
6. He needs a haircut. From a professional.

Ok, broken leg story. Yes, my - then - 14 month old baby broke his leg. sigh. We were getting ready to go somewhere so I was running around gathering socks and clean outfits, and in my hurried-ness must have left the door to the stairs open. Boy makes a mad dash for the stairs any time he sees the door is open, when he hears the door being opened. Seriously. MAD DASH. I'm fairly certain he had only climbed a few, 4 or 5 maybe, but he fell, and landed just the "right" way, apparently. I knew right away that he was hurt, but there was no apparent wound, unlike last summer. It was the way he was crying, the way only a mama would know. He was guarding his leg when I picked him up off the stairs where he was laying, on his belly on the second step, hands on the step below. Thinking there could be the possibility he would shake it off, I held him for a bit, then set him on the floor to see if he would start moving around. Nope. Whenever he tried he was clearly in pain, and still guarding his little leg. I tried feeling the leg to see if there were any obvious spots where it hurt, but no. So instead of grocery shopping, we went to Urgent Care. If you didn't know he was already a walker, you wouldn't have known anything was wrong by watching him in the waiting room. He crawled around everywhere, crazily. Its when he tried to stand that his little leg just wouldn't hold him or it hurt too much. So something was definitely wrong. They took a loooong time looking at x-rays, and even had to get a few more shots to be sure, but sure enough, he had broken it just below the knee. The break was stable, the bone didn't move at all, but he would be in a cast. They put a temp cast on there and the next day we went for a "real" cast. He was pretty mad about his decreased mobility, was seriously crabby for days and slept a lot for the first week. The cast has a bend in the knee so that 1. he can still crawl, and 2. to keep it from slipping off or up. Let me tell you, though. He is the image of perseverance. After about a week and a half, he figured out how to walk in the doggone thing. Seriously. Unbelievable. :) ahhhhhh. Kids! The doc said 2-3 weeks in a cast, but since he's not paying the bill and I have no desire to have him recast, I decide to wait 3 weeks. Well... today's the day. He should get the cast off this afternoon. And I'll be so glad to give him a bath.