Perpetual Motion Baby

Nearly two months ago, I uploaded a video to Facebook where Sasha and I talk and show off cuteness. Obviously, if you just clicked that link, you know I handled the former while Sasha took care of the latter. I think it’s safe to say we’ll never do that again. Why, you ask? Well, for one thing, it requires Sasha to stay in one place for more than .005 seconds. I don’t know what the hell got into our baby, but there’s now two things she never, ever does:

1. Sit still
2. Shut up

My wife caught her crawling about three weeks ago. Evgeniya pulled her out of the crib and put her on the floor of her room to play with toys, then went to the kitchen to cook lunch. After opening the fridge for ingredients, she closed it and looked down to see: Sasha, smiling up at her. At first, Evi thought our baby must have beamed over to the kitchen, Star Trek-style, because there’s no damn way she could’ve crawled that fast. Until that moment, all we’d ever seen her do was futilely lunge at something a foot and and half away. 

But, unfortunately, neither Scotty nor any transporter room was involved. Sasha could now crawl. And she can really scoot. 

Another thing we’ve discovered: she really seeks attention. All of her short life, people have been fawning over her, making ga-ga and goo-goo faces at her, even holding her. She of course loves this and behaves like the perfect happy Gerber baby in those situations. But, last Friday we went to some rednecky all-you-can-eat buffet, and nobody paid any attention to her. She didn’t do anything wrong, but the entire restaurant was filled with families with their own babies, or young couples who didn’t give a shit about anything that didn’t involve body piercing or being ironic. 

You could actually see Sasha attempting to make eye contact with total strangers. She would swing her head around from left to right and back again, trying to get positive reactions. She got nothing. 

Well, she wasn’t going to stand for that. Attention is what she wanted, so attention was what she was going to get. She started yelling. Not screaming, not crying, not whining, but pure yelling at the top of her lungs. We tried everything to quiet her down. The pacifier, formula, smashed rednecky food…nothing worked. I yelled to Evi over the din, “She crawls now, maybe I should put her on the ground and pretend she’s not ours.” She was not amused.

Finally, I picked her up, put her on my shoulder, and just randomly walked all around the restaurant. People were looking at us, wondering why a guy would be walking around a buffet without, you know, a plate, and with a baby looking over his head. 

But they were looking at us. Sasha loved it.

I’m not sure what my daughter is going to be when she grows up, but whatever it is, all eyes will need to be on her.