As long as I'm talking about Scott, I'll tell this one.  He was a wild wooly bugger from the git-go.  When he learned to pull himself up on the side of his crib, it took only a day or two before he could scale it.  He couldn't have been very many months old, but he was climbing the walls and the counters--using the drawer handles as steps--and whatever else "needed' climbing.  Action. That's what he wanted.  After having had the girls, who were 6 and 4 who were reasonably normal, he was an altogether new experience.

I put him down for a nap one afternoon--and watched to make sure he was asleep before I left the room--I already had his number and wasn't about to leave before he was asleep.  But just to be sure, a few minutes later,  I went back to check on him, just in case.  And he was gone.  I looked all through the house, the closets, and everywhere outside, and couldn't find him anywhere.  (He had already learned to pull something up to the door, climb on it and open the door--so I knew he might be outside.)  I was frantic.  I called the MP's and they started an "on base" search.  (We were in Beaufort S.C. at the Laurel Bay air station--next to the water--which Scott loved.  He was a fish snorkeling and blowing bubbles in the bath tub when he was 4 months old--like I said, wooly and wild--so I wondered if he had made it to the bay which was only a block away.)

The search with the MP's went on for an hour or so with no luck, so I went in the house, sat down and tried to calm myself and to try and think like Scott would think.  (Who could possibly do that.) Where would he go?  That's when I searched the house again--closets, etc., everywhere.  I finally looked in my room under our bed again and there he was back under the bookcase headboard.  He had crawled out of the crib with his blanket, and curled up with it out of sight under the headboard.

I gave up on containing him.  For the next two years I never let him very far out of my sight.  He was impossible to predict.  "Train up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  I'm afraid I won't live long enough to see that happen.  I don't think Scott will ever be "Old."