Life Lessons: All About Tummies

Pretty much ever since JD was born, Levor has blown raspberries on his tummy when he was changing JD's nappy. He found this a bit odd at first but soon came to find it entertaining and now shouts with laughter when he receives his requisite raspberry. (I have also adopted this, more as a strategy to keep JD lying on his back for two seconds so I can quickly put his nappy on before he flips himself over and takes off).

This is hardly interesting, except that somewhere in there JD has developed the understanding that tummies are for raspberries. This became evident when he was engaged in his usual pre-crawling activity of finding a prone adult, hitching himself up against them and bouncing his entire body up and down, while thumping them and singing at the top of his voice. This had the further advantage of guaranteeing that the prone adult would continue to be prone for quite some time.

So, one day engaged in this activity with Levor playing the part of prone adult, JD came across his stomach, exposed after quite a lot of thumping on JD's part. Unperturbed, JD stuck his head down and started to methodically blow raspberries all over his father's stomach.

We thought this was funny, but JD topped it in the following week. During a particularly bad night when he and I were lying down together at about 3am, and he had gone back to sleep, then quite suddenly he woke up. It was completely dark. And he woke up, not sad and annoyed and needing to go back to sleep, but wide awake. He sat up, found a handy prone adult right next to him and got stuck into the dancing-thumping-singing routine. Not long into this process he discovered an exposed stomache and set to blowing raspberries. Only this time he was too tired to actually keep his head up. So he just blew one long raspberry, moving a bit to the left and the right from time to time. Unfortunately I found this absolutely hilarious, which really didn't help in setting the context in which to explain to this odd little child that blowing raspberries was something people do during the day.



(In case you should think that he just blows raspberries on exposed flesh generally, this is not the case. I was sitting next to him the other day without socks on. He bit my toe.)

So, there you have it. Tummies are for blowing raspberries. It's what they're for.

We think we have probably ruined JD's ability to appreciate the bikini for all time.