Mischief at 8 Months

Moses is now 8 months old and is getting into everything. His favorite variety of mischief is playing with his brothers' shoes. Caleb has become quite the tattle-tale, frequently informing me that "Moses is touching the shoe" or "Moses is eating paper." It amazes me how the complusion to tell on one's siblings is so innate, since I'm sure that no one explicitly taught him to do this. I guess Caleb feels it's his duty as the eldest to keep his younger brothers in line. Joshua likes to keep me up-to-date on Moses' activities, as well, but his reports usually have a more positive spin, such as, "Mommy, Moses stood up," which actually happens so frequently now that Joshua doesn't even bother telling me about it most of the time anymore.

Sometimes Moses surprises us with other forms of mischief, such as the other day when I found him sitting on the kitchen floor sprinkled with a flaky green substance. Upon closer inspection I determined that he used his four enormous teeth to bite through a tea bag. After all, how could he have resisted something that so closely resembles his favorite delicacy, paper? Then today we caught him standing at the toilet, happily splish-splashing away. Miraculously, the toilet and toilet water were relatively clean, which isn't often the case in our one-bathroom house where two little boys have recently learned to pee standing up. To give you an idea of the kind of abuse our toilet suffers, the twins' favorite thing to do is stand at the toilet side by side and "make a cross" with their pee streams. But I digress. I'm sure we sent splash-happy Moses mixed signals when I asked Joe to go run and grab the camera and snap a few pictures while he was still in the act!

Moses is so much different than his big brothers were at this age. In addition to putting everything in his mouth (we were thankfully spared this common phenomenon when the twins were babies), being a lot bigger (he now wears the same clothes the twins wore when they were walking), and being developmentally advanced, he also seems much happier and is always smiling. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that he sleeps much longer stretches than his brothers did at this age. Moses also seems to have abandoned typical baby babbling and instead prefers to communicate by growling. The first time I heard him growling I could have sworn there was a grown man in the room, but no, it was our sweet Moses. It probably doesn't help that I tend to growl back at him, while hugging and kissing him, of course. I'm sure he now thinks this is a normal way to communicate!