Playing Peekaboo

Evan has enjoyed the game of peekaboo for quite some time now, but always in a very passive sense. If he was looking at you and you walked away he would wait for you to poke your head around the corner and say "Peekaboo!" and he would laugh, but in actuality you're the one playing peekaboo and he's just watching. For the first time today Evan really played peekaboo. Let me explain what I mean....

Every morning I go and get Evan up around 7:00, and the first thing I do is take him out of his crib (I went over that a few weeks ago) and change his diaper. Over the last few months he has gotten more squirmy on his changing table, so it's a constant challenge to find things to keep him occupied while you're doing what needs to be done. If there is a cloth diaper on the table (which there often is - we use them as rags instead of diapers and call them his towels, but he uses them as security blankets more than anything else and has trouble sleeping without one or two in his crib) I often play a little peekaboo with him before getting down to business. I'm not actually sure it makes him any less likely to try and roll over and grab the baby wipes or diaper cream, but it almost always makes him laugh, and even though Evan has a fairly rough laugh for a baby it's still the best sound in the history of the world.

So anyway, this morning was one of those times when there was a cloth diaper on the changing table, so I threw it over his face just after I laid him down. Normally Evan grabs the diaper as soon as he can and pulls it off so he can see you and then smiles real big when you say "Peekaboo!" Today, though, he didn't react right away. He just lay there with the towel over his face, so I started in on the whole "Where's Evan?" routine (a critical part of the peekaboo process). After 5 seconds or so he pulled down the diaper to reveal a big smile - he had been hiding from me! I said "There he is!" and we laughed a bit, and then he pulled the towel back over his face and lay still again. He waited several more seconds, and several more calls of "Where's Evan?", before pulling the towel back down and laughing. We repeated that five or six times in total before I decided that I should actually get back to changing his diaper at some point.

Evan is at a stage where he's learning to do something new practically every other day, and it's so much fun to watch him grow and help him along.