The Working Baby's New Pastime

We were somewhat chagrined last weekend, on an outing to the zoo, to realize that the Working Baby is rather loud for a person her size. She spent much of the day perched on Dad, Esq.'s arm, pointing at animals, plants, streams of water, other children, and crowing gleefully. Admittedly, the zoo is not exactly a quiet place, but still, trailing behind my family in the buildings, jockeying with the other moms pushing child-less strollers (someone's gotta do it, I guess), I could hear the Working Baby's squeal above the not insignificant noise of the crowd.

Since she doesn't have many words yet, the squeal is pretty primal--it sounds sort of like something from Jurassic Park, maybe a cross between the adorable, creaky sound the cute-but-vicious little guys in the second (or is it the third?) movie make, crossed with the T-rex's roar (but much, much quieter). And sometimes it's just the kind of high-pitched scream the humans on the island make as they're being devoured by the dinosaurs.

Thankfully, her noises are generally happy ones; but still ... they're loud. And since her big sound lately is "B," there's a percussive element that by the end of a day at the zoo starts to jab directly into the front of the brain.

There was a street fair outside our office a few weeks ago, and since the Working Baby had been all about pointing out balloons in her books, and there was a private school handing out balloons practically next door, I got her one. Big mistake: who would have thought a balloon would be a loud toy? She spent the rest of the afternoon walking around screaming BALLOON--or, at least, her version of that word, which is a little short on the LLOON part but still sounds significantly different from her version of BALL, of which she has two at the office. Very small ones. And when she learns how to throw them, they will leave. But in the meantime she enjoys a little game of fetch with the Cool Boss when he stops by of an afternoon. Really, sometimes it's like having an office puppy. (More about that later: have I mentioned that apparently 20% of American employers let employees bring dogs to work?!)

Anyway, Cool Coworker has been holding the Working Baby up to the window (we're on the second floor) to look out at people lately, and the other day she started trying balancing on part of a radiator to get a good view on her own--which was a disaster waiting to happen, especially since the radiator in question is in the other room. So I've set her up a box under the window next to my desk, and she can climb up and look out the window and--this is the not-so-good part--yell out when she sees BOYS! or BABIES! or BALLS! or BALLOONS! or DOGS! But it does keep her busy for a good long time.

Except today she made a proud squawk, and I looked up to see she had climbed from the box on to the top of the garbage can next to her, which is maybe a little to high and too unstable for her to jump down from, so we may need to tweak this system a bit...