Father's Daze

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week, I promised more adventures with Aiden, but I didn’t say they’d be new adventures. Thus, we rerun this oldie but … well, it’s an oldie, like me.

The laws of mathematics are supposed to be inviolable and immutable. The laws of mathematics, however, never came face to face with a baby, a toddler or an infant.

Had they, they would have been trumped long ago.

We had that reinforced for us last week when we baby sat for our grandson Aiden while his mother and father spent the week doing some extra work for their Army Reserve unit.

For instance, it’s a basic law of mathematics that two is greater than one. It’s true, that is, until the two is two grandparents and the one is a 9-month-old grandson.

Aiden is still just crawling around, but we found out he can get around pretty quick on all fours — a lot quicker than either one of his grandparents on only two legs, or both of us together on four legs.

Again, another basic law of mathematics broken — two plus two definitely does not equal four in this case.

The only thing that saved us is that Aiden gets bored with crawling around and exploring quite easily. At that point, he usually just wants to be held for a while, which affords everyone involved a chance to catch their breath and get ready for the next round.

The only problem is, Aiden’s grandparents are both at an age where it takes a lot longer to bounce back and re-energize than it does for him.

Fortunately, we don’t have a huge house, so we didn’t have to chase around too much to keep track of Aiden; and when both of us were home, we could keep him pretty well corralled between the two of us.

He hasn’t gotten around to crawling up and down stairs yet — although he did make a few tentative ventures toward the first step of the stairs to the second floor in our house during the week. When he starts doing that, we’re really in trouble. Reinforcements will likely be needed at that point.

One-on-one, however, proved to be a bit more of a challenge, as we disproved yet another law of mathematics — one definitely did not equal one in this case.

We definitely had to keep close watch on him, as he’s in full-blown exploratory mode, checking out everything he can get his hands on.

We left our days of baby-proofing the house long behind us, or so we thought, but apparently they’ve come back.

We managed to keep Aiden from anything dangerous or threatening — even the dogs’ food or toys. But that didn’t prevent him from wreaking some havoc.

For instance, he discovered that several of the shelves in Terry’s kitchen cabinet were at the perfect level for him when she inadvertently left the doors to the cabinet open and he beat her back into the kitchen one day.

It didn’t take long for him to empty the contents of the shelves he could reach — spice jars, soup cans, Jell-O boxes and more — onto the kitchen floor. We were only grateful that he hasn’t learned to open jars or rip open boxes, or we would have had quite a collage on our kitchen floor.

Of course, to truly baby proof the house we’d have to suspend everything in every room of the house from the ceiling, at least three or four feet above the floor, but that really wouldn’t work well for the adults in the house unless we could defy the law of gravity — but so far Aiden is the only one who can defy laws, since he apparently hasn’t learned anything about mathematics or physics yet.

Speaking of the laws of physics, that’s another set of laws of which Aiden seems to be completely ignorant.

For instance, the laws of physics supposedly say that you cannot increase the volume of an object.

After changing just a few of Aiden’s diapers, though, I’m beginning to have my doubts about the validity of that law as well.

For instance, an 8-ounce bottle of formula or juice weighed at least two or three times that much by the time it wound up in his diaper.

Somehow he was making any liquid that entered him at least double or triple in volume by the time it came out.

And don’t even get me started on the conservation of energy, which says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, that the total amount of energy in a system remains constant.

The total amount of energy in Aiden’s system seemed to fluctuate wildly, while that in his grandparents’ systems seemed to dwindle and dissipate at a steady but rapid pace as the week wore on — and we wore out.W

e just have to learn now what law of physics applies to regenerating grandparents’ energy before the next time Aiden comes for a visit.