And I Wouldn't Change Him For The World

When I have to go out of the living room and into my kitchen to do something it is now safer to keep the door shut and Joseph on the other side of it. He gets into everything now, he opens the bin, pulls things off shelves, tries to get in the dishwasher and run off with the dirty spoons and plays with the washing machine.
He turns the programme select dial round and round and round until at about eight months old the washing machine had had enough of this and decided that it wasn't going to select any more programmes. It was going to stay on the same one, no matter what I did with the dial.
Still, at less than a year old we got it fixed for free, but if Joseph keeps up his antics I suspect there's a limit on how often they'll replace the same component. The engineer said that the plastic shaft behind the dial had "exploded". Well done Joseph.
So now he stays on the other side of the door at all times. I have to have my ears pricked constantly to work out what he's doing and to be honest I'm less worried when he's making lots of noise, even if it's loud crashes and bangs. It's when it goes totally quiet that I worry.
He went quiet this week. I was tidying up after breakfast, playing the game of tetris with the dishwasher and all the bowls, plates and left over stuff from the night before.
He went so quiet! He's only that quiet when asleep!
I opened the door slowly, just a little. There he was sitting on the floor holding Andys pair of cheap cycling sunglasses with the funny reflective lenses. He was holding them up to his own face and peering through them, gently coo-ing to himself.
It was a relief, I have to admit. Still, it's not like the time he decided to see what was down behind the sofa and he got a little way in and got stuck. I had to shout to Andy not to open the kitchen door or the poor little boy would have got cut in half! Definitely a laugh or cry moment.
He's also taken to moving our doormat. We have a big one by the door and a small one at the foot of the stairs where we sit and put our shoes on. Some days he decides that they really need to be in the middle of the living room and not by the door. Sometimes they need to be upside down. Sometimes almost everything we own needs to be posted through the bars of the stair gate.
Kids, eh?