In Charles' ninth month of life outside the womb, he has finally learned to crawl. Is my son retarded, as in, slow to achieve? Shouldn't he have been doing this months ago? According to parenting books, yes. Also, he started babbling about a week-and-a-half ago, something he should have been doing at about seven months.

What is perhaps more worrying to his stumbling-blindly-through-this-life mother is that he HATES crawling. I had expected him to be ecstatic over his newfound freedom of movement. Instead, every time he hoists himself onto hands and knees, he cries. Cries because he wants to get to me, to the dog, to Tony, to the laundry basket, to the toys faster, faster, FASTER! Crawling is hard for him, and clearly too slow a means of transportation. He is an angry little boy, throwing temper tantrums, which I didn't expect to see for at least a few more months, over the smallest things, and especially when he can't move fast enough or when he is left alone for more than a second. His crawling, more often than not, turns into a frenzied army-crawl as the tears fall harder and faster the more he realizes that he is oh-so-far away from his goal.

And the sleeping. Never a great sleeper, Charles seemed to be doing so well (up only once each night), until his eye teeth started coming in, and now his front teeth are descending, ONE AT A TIME, thankyouverymuch, and he wakes up screaming at all hours of the night. To top it all off, he has given up the binky (probably because of those pesky front teeth) and has not quite learned how to soothe himself without it. The requisite cold that has accompanied all of his teeth so far causes him to wake up crying from his naps.

He wears 24-month clothes and weighs 25 pounds. And he's cute as a button. I just hope no one mistakes him for an 18-month-old with learning disabilities.

And I, I feel more like I have a parasite now than I did during the first nine months of his life, when I was pregnant. I am still fat, embarrassingly fat. Everybody always says "nine months up, nine months down," but why am I still 10lbs overweight? I can't go to the bathroom without him, unless I want him to scream (which I let him do on a regular basis. My back can only take so much hauling him around, and it's clearly not hurting him to cry for 30 seconds while I put in my contacts or whatever - bad mothering, sigh, but I have to at least get dressed each day!). I can't make enough milk for him to attend daycare AND have a night out without him, so that's just going to have to wait until he's weaned (at the rate we're going, that will be NEVER, as the boy likes him some boob). I don't know how to soothe him to sleep without nursing him (this is where you bottle-feeding mothers have an advantage - nursing is such a crutch), and I can never be sure if his near-constant fussing is from pain or frustration or mere obstinate behavior.

Were it not for the fact that I love him with my whole being, I would surely have gone nuts by now. I give him a thousand kisses each day (and he kisses back!). I breathe deeply the little-boy scent he is developing. I make him laugh when we dance together. As he wriggles each time I take his diaper off, I wrangle him back, amid his protests, to a clean, dry diaper.

It's tough. I feel like I have done all the things I was supposed to: breastfeeding, cloth diapering, homemade baby food, lots of reading, etc, and I still have screwed him up somehow. He can barely crawl. He can't walk. He can't talk. He can barely babble. He doesn't have the hand coordination of a 9-month-old - he can't clap or wave his hands in the air on cue or anything like that. Where did I go wrong? Is all this cuteness worth it if he is stupid? Also, don't get me wrong, I am not calling Charles stupid, I am simply wondering if that's the explanation here. And what will I do if that's the case?