inside looking out

The weather is turning beautiful and I find myself wanting to spend every moment outside; Jonathan is turning 11 months and finding himself wanting to spend every moment crawling around chasing things and putting them in his mouth. I took him outside this morning to see how playing in our backyard would go. I swept off our wooden deck so that it was cleaner than it has ever been, spread out a quilt, and brought some non-rolling toys. Jonathan immediately crawled off of the quilt onto the splintery wood and found a myriad of pebbles, leaves and dead rolly-pollys to eat. Wonderful. We spend about 10 minutes battling out between the eating dirt and me grabbing things out of his hands/mouth before I called it quits and brought us inside.

I am again stymied by my lack of knowledge about small children. Will the eating everything stage fade soon? Is it worth investing in one of those large baby gate pen things and some sort of ground covering so we can be outside this summer? Or when crawling turns to walking, will he be less inclined to put everything in his mouth? I love taking him on walks/runs but there is only so much of that that either of us can handle at one time. We can go to the park or the beach but I'm not sure he can play on the ground yet. And it drives me crazy to sit inside looking out a the sunshine. I'm sure we will figure it out. I just wish I had a sense of what stages were coming next and how soon so I knew how to prepare.