The baby races!

I just have a funny, silly story to share with you all today.

Last Saturday, some of our friends were moving, and through a series of events I ended up watching their 1-year-old son along with Frankie and our neighbors' 1-year-old daughter while Frank and our friends helped with the move.

I took them for a walk. The boy in the stroller, Frankie in my ring sling, and the little girl walking along "helping" me push the stroller. Very helpful.

We made it to the park and went on the swings, and I kind of felt like superwoman as I rotated babies from ground to swings (there were only 2 swings). We were there for about 15 minutes before the little boy freaked out a bit that his mom wasn't there, so I put him back in the stroller and we began our odyssey home.

The little girl got tired of walking (it was a long walk for her!) so I ended up carrying her back in my arms while still wearing Frankie and pushing the stroller. We took a lot of breaks. I'm proud to report that there was only one incident of a runaway baby knocking on a stranger's door, and only a little bit of crying, and no one ran into the street! It was a great success.

Except it was really hot out and I must have really looked like crap when I got back, because all the other adults kept bringing me glasses of water and saying, "Here, Tess, you really look like you need this." But hey, I'll take it.

Later on my friend Anita came to help with baby duty, and she brought her 1-year-old daughter too. It was just the two of us in charge of four 1-year-olds in a mostly-empty apartment.

So what did we do? We had a baby race.

Let me set the scene. Here are the contestants (from left to right: Girl 1, Girl 2, Frankie, and Boy 2):

We lined them up against the back wall, a sliding glass door that overlooked the balcony. Anita went to the other side of the room and dramatically poured out a line of Puffs—the finish line. Whichever baby got to the Puffs first would be the winner.

Boy 2 started crawling first, but he only went about a foot before he noticed his mom wasn't there and stopped crawling to scream.

Girl 2 made the next move, but instead of crawling, she turned around to look out the glass door and got completely (and adorably) distracted by the view. She never even noticed there was a race going on.

Girl 1 really got into the spirit of things. She ran excitedly toward the Puffs, but was so carried away by her enthusiasm that she ran right past them and kept going out the front door.

Frankie, meanwhile, crawled right over to the Puffs and started stuffing them in his mouth. He won by default.

And Anita and I almost fell over laughing.