According to some apparently somewhat reliable chart on the Internet, here are some ''milestones'' you should be hitting. According to the chart, we supposedly should be very proud parents. Let's have a look:
Uses two words skillfully
I find your acquisition of the words ''this'' and ''that'' to be both astoundingly lazy and endearingly clever. Whether or not you use these words skillfully is contingent upon one's perspective (saying this until you realize no one is getting it for you, and then yelling that until someone does, while not reflecting a particularly accurate meaning of these words, does get the job done). This seems to be, however, the extent of your linguistic efforts, and because it accomplishes anything and everything you may want to do, I can see you eventually falling behind. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Baby, you come across as a li-ttle bit bossy.
Throws objects overhand
...directly at people's faces and into the toilet.
Discovers the joy of climbing
Ahead of schedule! How fantastic. Let's talk about gravity again. You seem to have determined, in a set of truly exhaustive and exhausting experiments, that spoons and sippy cups, if dropped, fall to the ground. (Now you're just doing it over and over again to fuck with with us). Unfortunately you have not been able to make what I think is a relatively simplistic leap and extend the application of that rule to all objects. Climbing, such joy. Turning around and walking straight off the stairs, straight off the chairs, straight off the tables! And should someone turn around for two seconds and fail to uphold your delusions of gravitational freedom? Rather than drawing some kind of logical conclusion from the experience, you give accusatory looks. You are a really, really mean, bad mommy, they say.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again - I'm telling you, Mr. Baby, just to save everyone some time and aggravation - gravity applies to everything on the fucking planet. Didn't you like my song? (Gra-vity, da da, you make everything FALL, even babies who climb up the WALL...da da da doom)?
May throw temper tantrums.
I don't get it either, kid, but it's on the charts. I'll be frank, Mr. Baby, I don't remember when you took your first step exactly, and I should have written down the day your started crawling or jamming a spoon in your eye in an attempt to eat. But December 10, 2011 at 4:21 pm in the checkout line of Wal-Mart (By the way, Wal-Mart? Such a cliché, kid) is singed with a sort of Pavlovian permanence - that's right, the twitchy kind - into my memory. I had suspected other events of being temper tantrums, but I know things now that I didn't know then. Like unless it can truly and legitimately be mistaken by a health care professional as an epileptic seizure, unless Catholic priests begin offering their services as exorcists, unless a strange and eerie silence precedes it while all of the air is sucked out of the room, unless the sound that is made exceeds - both in decibels and pitch - anything ever heard before on this planet (including The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet), it is not a temper tantrum. I know this now, Mr. Baby. Now I know.
Initiates games
You initiate one game. I'm calling it: Put A Blanket Over My Head And I Will Run Until I Smack Into An Object And Fall Over Backwards Laughing And Hitting My Head, but I think something shorter might be more catchy.
May get finicky about food.
Judging by your dual-performance capacity as both vacuum cleaner and garbage disposal,*
I doubt this will happen. Pickled herring? Unremarkable. Slice of lemon, including skin? Hardly noticeable. Bits of apple stashed somewhere in the living room that you occasionally pull out, in various states of decay, and munch on? Dental floss, tufts of dog fur (real and synthetic), dishwashing soap tablet? (FYI, concerned parents - it's totally cool for a 25-pound baby to eat up to three Finish Powerball dishwashing tablets, according to Baby's First Call Of Many To Poison Control). Mushrooms, blue cheese, banana peel, entire contents of the overturned compost container, pine cones, tissue, toothpaste, baby soap, conditioner? You don't discriminate. I honestly wouldn't mind a little bit of pickiness. You could, for example, start by creating two categories (say, organic and non-organic matter), and work down from there.
May switch from 2 naps to 1
Don't you dare, Mr. Baby. Don't. You. Dare.
*Canadians, for reasons they cannot, much like their legal system, explain, use the word garburator for this item. This word is silly to the point of being obscene, for many reasons, the most important of which being that Canadians are not particularly silly people, thus generating an overall effect that is rather creepy. Like Teletubbies. I'm going to request as such that you speak American around the house.
