Baby Tucker keeps real close tabs on mommy while I’m at home. He used to want me to hold him all evening long. Now he enjoys walking around and climbing up into daddy’s lap to play each night, but it seems like he’s always watching me in the corner of his eye. If I leave the room, he immediately stops what he is doing and jumps up to chase after me, and if I close the door behind me, well he really gets upset then. He was laying on daddy’s shoulders last night giving him the sweetest long hug when I decided I would sneak into the laundry room real quick without him following me, but his head popped up off daddy’s shoulder just like a little guard dog.
We all laughed and my husband said in his deepest prison loudspeaker imitation, “Mommy has left the perimeter! I repeat, mommy has left the perimeter! The perimeter has been breached!”
Within seconds, baby Tucker was banging on the laundry room door in a panic. It’s beautiful to be loved so deeply, but it’s so hard to enjoy a relaxing shower when I can hear him crying in the background, louder than the sound of the running water.
When I need to do something that requires two hands, I sometimes find myself ducking below tables and tip-toeing around like my daughter does when she pretends to be a sneaky ninja….only I’m not as good at it. Most of the time he sees me right away and then he just thinks we are playing peek-a-boo.
I can very seldom escape, but when he catches up with me, and looks up at me with those little puppy dog eyes and says “ma ma ma” my heart just melts. Then he slobbers me up good as he tries to give me kisses.
He’s really gotten to love picking up things off the floor and giving them a taste, too. I hate sticking my finger in his mouth to dig out whatever he has, so now that he’s a little older, I am trying to just hold my hand out in front of his mouth as a signal for him to spit it out. It’s the cutest little thing because he tries so hard but he just hasn’t gotten the hang of it. He smiles mischievously to acknowledge that he’s eaten something he wasn’t supposed to, and he leans his little neck over into my hand and gets me all nice and slobbery, but most of the time it’s stuck to the roof of his mouth, (since his floor snacks of choice are most often tiny pieces of paper). It is so funny.
He’s like the cutest, sweetest little puppy dog I’ve ever seen, and if he wants to follow me everywhere and slobber me with kisses, that’s okay with me. There’s a lot of love in that slobber!