Safe and Dangerous

Hello Mr. Baby!

We seem to have a little discrepancy again, and it's regarding things that are safe and dangerous, and our respective definitions of these things.  Typically, in a dispute of this type, the concerned parties discuss What They Meant By X and arrive at some sort of civil and plastic compromise.  However, your judgment seems to be really, really off the mark here, really severely impaired, not even stemming from the same realm of physics governing this universe.  As such, I'm just going to go ahead and assert my authoritarianism for the first of what I am sure will be many, many times and tell you that there is certain shit, Mr. Baby, that you just have to cut the hell out.  Why?  I am so delighted that you asked.  Because I said so, which you perhaps can tell from the anticipatory tapping of my fingertips beneath my delightedly sinister expression, is something I've just been waiting around to say.  And because, Mr. Baby - and this is just indisputable in light of your recent actions - those branching, flowering neurons you are purportedly growing in there have clearly not gotten around to colonizing the part of your brain responsible for common, life-preserving sense.

Lo! I've made a list of dangerous things for you, but I've also been so kind as to include a safe alternative for your convenience.  The last thing we want, Mr. Baby, is to cause you any sort of inconvenience or discomfort.

Dangerous: Eying with gentle intensity, and then placing, with alarming celerity, everything you see in your mouth, with a bit of a predilection for both the shiny and the crusty.
Safe Alternative: Placing items, screened by your caregivers, largely for the specific qualities of not having gamboled about on the floor or toured the mouth of the dog, and not being designated for slicing food, in your mouth. I'll just go ahead and save you a little bit of suspense and haplessness in life; crusty is rarely a desirable quality, for your mouth, or underwear, or socks.

Dangerous: Swallowing earplugs and plastic bags.
Safe Suggestion: Swallowing the meticulously researched and thoughtfully spiced, nutritionally calibrated and lovingly prepared baby food that you are fed on a very safe, rubber-tipped spoon.  In fact, you could simply reverse the way you are doing things now, and spit out earplugs or plastic bags with the same powerful, projectile vehemence that you reserve for rice mush and beans (this has the concurring benefit of being not annoying, which is another list I intend to make for you).

Dangerous: Sucking the well water that even the dog disapproves of (a formidable condemnation indeed, from a beast who blithely and unperturbed, devours piles of shit and antifreeze) out of your washcloth at bath time.
Safe (and I really thought this might have been obvious...) sucking the distilled water out of the washcloth that someone soaked for you in distilled water and gave to you as a substitute in a rare moment of prescience.  One caveat, however - this must be done before, not after, dunking it into the bathwater, which, sigh Mr. Baby, sigh, is just one of the myriad of techniques you have developed for dismantling the best-made plans. 

Dangerous: Feigning a complete and total lack of recall of the ability to roll, and then suddenly and with a sense of humor befit devious lemmings, having somehow determined that the person supervising you has begun to trust your spurious lateral immobility, zealously demonstrating those skills while atop a high surface.
Safe: Rolling in your crib, or on cue while people are watching and requesting that you do so in a safe and supervised setting. 

Dangerous: Licking the dog.
Safe (somewhat): Licking yourself.

Dangerous:  The new game you have devised for bath time, which involves looking somewhat tired and waiting, with shifty eyes no less, for someone to glance away for a nanosecond, then grinning merrily while scrunching yourself into a little baby ball with your nostrils skimming the water's surface and laughing heartily at the ensuing chaos while still partially underwater.
Safe: Remaining calm, unscrunched, and upright in the bathtub, with your face well above the water line. 

Dangerous: Waiting, watching, with a perversity and savage sense of timing, for the moment that the person next to you is finally drifting in the sun-bleached, sweetly blurry foyer of sleep, and then rolling over, placing your mouth very close to that person's ear, and for no discernable reason, yelling AHH AHH AHH AHH AHH AHH AHH AHH in a nagging, frantic little voice. 
Safe: Sleeping through the night.  In your crib.  Quietly.  (Also to be included in a future list entitled Irritating, and Not).

Mr. Baby, that's it for now, but I will just leave this open-ended, as I have no doubt of your ability to conjure more and more dangerous ideas, swelling in their foolish monstrosity as a function of your mobility.  I caution you that the oft-repeated threat involving a giant hamster ball is not entirely hyperbolic, and I'm just the sort of person to do such a thing.  I am.