I remember Luke going through a period when he got really good at crawling and he would start crawling around the crib in the middle of the night. Usually, he either found himself a different spot, lay down, and fell back asleep, or he bumped his head on the sides of the crib and woke up. Like many of the other unpleasant stages, I had forgotten about this one.

I remember now, of course, because Weston is smack dab in the middle of it. Except that this time around, the crib has been serving primarily as a place to hold clean laundry until I can get around to folding it and the baby sleeps on a mattress on the floor.

So instead of bumping into the sides of the crib, if he's alone on his bed, he bumps into the walls. The nightstand. He crawls off the mattress and sits by the door. (He has learned, you see, that a lot of times, if I'm not in bed with him, it's probably because I'm still downstairs, so he whines and crawls to the door and sits there, squinting at it and holding up his arms and moaning like a zombaby.) He sometimes crawls into the bathroom. I don't know why.

All of which is better than what he does if I happen to be in bed with him, which is to climb on me, find a spot for his head, and fall back asleep. Which then means that, uh, I have 21 pounds of sleeping, drooling, snoring baby perched precariously on me and if I move, he's likely to wake up. Or he tries to nurse, but since he's asleep, ends up latched onto my arm or my face. There are few things quite as disconcerting as being woken by a baby who is drooling into your ear canal. *Shudder*

I am very much looking forward to the end of this phase. Except that somewhere, in the bleary recesses of my memory, I seem to remember that after this phase comes the one where the baby starts to--heaven help us all--WALK in his sleep.