Grand Pierre

Well, today's news is that I have just gone solo in grandparenting.  I was entrusted with over two hours of entirely unassisted baby-minding, and achieved a perfect score on the basic skills of (1) keeping both parties alive, and (2) avoiding any shrieks of such ear-piecing loudness as to cause permanent deafness.  I did all this by merely accommodating little Layla's every whim, so far as I was able to determine them.  Of course, that requires a certain amount of creative empathy because she can basically only squeal and squeak, but it's pretty obvious that the only thing she cares about most of the time is standing up. She hasn't quite mastered it yet and she does need something to grab hold of, to elevate herself out of the default sitting position, but her determination is quite something to behold. She hasn't got very far with balance yet though.  And there are so many distractions.  Especially shiny things.

All this preoccupation with standing means that crawling isn't really a thing yet.  Layla's nearest approach to a crawling stance looks more like AdhoMukha Svasasana (downward facing dog).  The next move is to lift one arm and rotate backwards (somewhat in the manner of Utthita Trikoasana or Ardha Chandrasana) until equilibrium is finally restored by a gentle collapse into a sort of floppy Sukhasana (sitting cross legged).  None of this provides any locomotion, however, which is source of frustration, especially when there are so many interesting things just out of reach.

Meanwhile, it seems that one must adopt a special name to be a grand parent (especially a fake one like me).  I have been awarded the name Grand Pierre, which I quite like, as it reminds me of my great mate Pierre.  We met at university, and he declared that since it was confusing that I was called Pete and so was he, he would call me Pierre.  I declared that for the sake of symmetry, I would call him Pierre.  And so it was, until he died some years ago.

Pierre smoked roll-ups all his life, and then died of a form of lung cancer which, they told him, is not associated with smoking.  He found this very ironic (but he was still very pissed off about it).

I did overhear someone, who was speaking baby-talk to Layla at the time, refer to me as Petey-poos.  So there's another reason to be pleased that it's officially Grand Pierre.

Pierre