Backwards

Saturday morning, I took it upon myself to teach Luca how to crawl. As Elijah stared into the TV, I put Luca down on his stomach and sat right in front of him and gave him pointers.

“You see, what you wanna do is work your upper body. But you also want to get your legs involved here, buddy. Pump those legs. Pump those legs.”

I’d even put a toy right outside of his reach in an attempt to bait him into crawling.

“See? See this thing that has Grover’s spit all over it? Go get it.”

And then, he started to get it. He actually started moving. But backwards.

He was doing the army crawl with his arms. But he shoved his body backwards. But I think it was technically crawling. So I encouraged him by shoving my face in his face and acted as motivational speaker.

“Be the crawl! Visualize your one-ness with the crawl!”

And then, sure enough, he’d scoot backwards another couple inches.

“Yeah! You’re doing it!”

Scoot scoot scoot.

And then it dawned on me. I had just consumed my third coffee of the day on top of my terrible, terrible morning breath.

My son was simply trying to get away from the foul odor coming out of my face.

Who knew bad breath could be such a motivator? But I see his point. Many a time, I get work done in meetings simply to get away from a cigarette smoking, cheese eating, coffee swilling co-worker sitting next to me.

Tomorrow, I’m going to eat a fist full of garlic and instruct Eli how to clean his room.