no cats, or tiny toddlers, were harmed in the writing of this essay

When I was in college I lived in a two unit house just up the street from the center of town. For a long time it seemed to be a music majors house, as renter after renter all passed through the halls of the Hugh A. Glauser School of Music. I lived there for a few years, with a very interesting room mate and her thought he was interesting but really wasn't interesting at all boyfriend. And a very large, very loud bird. A bird that needed to go to bed every night by 9:00pm, which meant that no one could enter the living room. Not even if you paid rent. Which the bird did not. What on earth did that bird need so much sleep for anyways? Big final the next day? Tough commute to the office? Why?

Also living with us in this house were a few loving cats and a huge fish tank made of hand blown glass, (not always the best idea, as the glass occasionally broke and we had first row seats to the circle of life.) But the cats, they were cool.

One of these cats was truly not bright. Dim. Very very dim. But he loved to be outside, so my room mate would sometimes put him on a leash and let him hang out with us on the front porch. Until the day he fell off the porch rail, while the leash was attached to the front door. I'll give you a minute to get the mental picture. Basically, a cat, on a string, hanging off the side of the porch, feet not touching the ground. Thank God we were there to rescue him.

Fast forward twenty years a handful of years to this afternoon. My mother in law recently gave my tiny toddler a hand made blanket that my husband used as a baby. Doing the math we know that this blanket is at least 40 years old. I was terrified that it would just fall apart when I washed it before giving it to my son, but it held up like a trooper. So I gave it to my little guy, and he loves it. He knows it was Daddy's blanket and I think that is why he loves it so.  He carries it all around the house. I know, right? Everyone say it together, awwwwww. So this blanket is  slightly larger than your normal baby blanket, which means it drags behind him like a bridal train. Which is normally not a problem until his oh so loving big brother steps on it, causing the little guy to stop in his tracks and snap backwards. The yarn this thing is made from has a lot of give to it.

I don't think that my tiny toddler had ever encountered a set of stairs until we brought him to our hotel in Russia. Thanks to the daily rain we had the horror  pleasure of investigating every inch of the hotel, including the stairs. My little man spent hours crawling up to the top and then sliding down, on his belly, feet first. Once home he taught my big four and a half year old how to do this little stunt and it caught on. Even though he is tall enough now to actually walk up and down the stairs he still slides down at top speed. He goes so fast that one day I actually saw him hit the bottom step and fly into the front door. He rolled over onto his back, put him hand to his head, and giggled.

This is a lot of back story just to tell you this: today after his nap my tiny toddler grabbed his over sized knit green and white blanket and headed down the hall to the steps. As he rounded the corner to begin his death defying slide down the stairs his blanket trailed behind him. And then it got caught on the door stopper on the hallway side of the ledge at the top of the stairs. He didn't know this, however, so he began his slide and got halfway down before the slack in the blanket caught up with him. He stopped dead in his tracks, literally dangling on the stairs, hanging on to the blanket. The look on his face was priceless. Total confusion.

He refused to let go of the blanket so by the time I freed him he had rolled around on the steps to the point of capture. He looked like a crab in net. And you would think he would be maybe just a little bit scared, but not this tough little guy. When he was finally free he bent down, scooped up the offending blanket, and shook his tiny finger at it while loudly yelling "no, no blanket!"

So history does repeat itself. A blanket doing it's second tour of baby duty created the same scene as a leash some twenty years later, only now there was a baby hanging off the end, instead of a cat.