Returning home after 5 days visiting family, Bernard is reimplanted into his natural environment (ie our living room) and I can at last see how quickly he is developing. Five days ago, if I planted him on the sitting room floor, I was able to coax him into crawling a few paces by constructing a precarious tower of blocks and saying to him “now, don’t demolish that.”
But now, he is flying across the room, cuddling the door (he is strangely fond of doors). A springing noise causes me to raise my head, and I realise that he has figured out how to open my CD box (better find the keys for that). He paws at the glass panel on the (long since childproofed) TV unit, trying to reach the LCD displays behind it. He pulls himself up to a stable kneeling position on the edge of the coffee table, increasing his vertical range by a foot or two. A whole slew of areas just got added to the “to-clear” list. He attempts to manually fillet a small book of Oscar Wilde quotes (which were deliberately placed in his reach for this purpose).
This is all very, very brilliant.