who needs Mt. Everest when you have a possibly insurmountable couch?

Give him some rope, a pair of special traction shoes and a few of those clippy things, and he'll be all set, because this dude is a climber. Pudge has discovered that the high IKEA stool in the kitchen is a great thing to scale up, but not so much fun when he's tumbling off backwards. Ditto for the little chairs at the art table in the living room. (Thankfully, I saw him in time before he fell off the table itself!)

And then there's the couch, definitely his biggest accomplishment so far. He mostly whines for others to pull him up, but the few times that he's gotten on it all by his lonesome, he has worn the hugest smile of self-pride I've ever seen adorn his beautiful face. That's the good part. The bad part is that he apparently perceives the couch as a short, straight running track-- perhaps he's training for the 2 meter dash? He exudes the same amount of joy while running as he does for the accomplished climb, yet I can't cheer this part on for him. So, we play the battle of "You need to sit on the couch, or you'll get down,"-- once, twice, then three times and you're down, buddy. As you can imagine, he's not so much a fan of that, so we now have the great pleasure of enduring one very frustrated screamer-in-training (big sis is a FANTASTIC coach!) several times a day. Good times.