Well, it's official: J.R. took his first steps. He had taken one a while back, but I think that was out of bravery, and not knowing his limits, because he didn't really complete that step before he fell. But this time, he actually took two or three steps at a time. For the last couple of days, Bryan had been working with him on taking steps, but he would always crouch down and crawl. He wasn't ready.
But then last night, I was walking him down the hall to say goodnight to Bryan before he went to bed, and I let him go a foot or so away from Bryan, and he walked to him! Bryan turned him around and he took about three steps to come back to me! It was so cool! It is times like that when I am glad that J.R. doesn't go to a sitter every day. Think of the firsts that we would have missed! I saw so many of Julie's firsts, and you can't catch every single one on video or in a photo, so her parents missed a lot. I always felt bad, just like I did the day that my little brother Alexander pulled out his first loose tooth when he was visiting me one weekend. My mom had already missed out on so much with him, and she missed out on that too, I felt horrible. I was honored that I got to be there for it, of course, but sad that she wasn't.
But anyway, I realize I didn't update when he started crawling... Literally the weekend after the previous post, he started moving forward instead of backward all the time. At first he would just use one foot on the floor to move his back end along, more scooting than crawling. A couple days after that, he would try to crawl for real. But while we were visiting my mom in Arizona, he really got the crawling thing nailed. His poor little knees were so red from the carpet, but he didn't seem to care. Once we got home, he was into EVERYTHING! He zoomed from one place to another. And boy did he learn how to go fast! All that contentment about playing by himself faded in that week. He was into everything he could get his hands on, and most of it was off limits... So then came some serious babyproofing. The coffee table was cleaned off except for Bryan's laptop, which became off limits. Furniture corner cushions were put on the sharp corners of our end table. Phone books were removed from sight, and I started doing some serious vacuuming to remove animal hair from the floor. He still managed to find every little clump of hair and small rock that I missed, though. Babyproofing is still a work in progress. Just yesterday I moved his stroller into his bedroom, because he pulled it down on top of himself and left a cut on his head. A few days before we were due to leave for my mom's, he fell off our bed and hit the side of his head on the side table we had in there. It left a pretty good bruise. It had pretty much faded by the trip date, though, which was good.
Now, the Arizona trip. I was really concerned about flying with J.R. Now that he was mobile on his own, I was worried that he would balk at sitting still for an hour to three hours at a time. I was also apprehensive about what the pressure changes would be like for him. From what my mom tells me, I had a hard time with pressure changes the first time I flew, so I wasn't sure if J.R. would have inherited that. But he did wonderfully. I nursed him during takeoff, and then he wanted to play, so we played games in our seat and the lady that sat next to us on the first leg of the trip played grandma. She held him and played with him on her lap, she was really nice. She even got a toy out that she kept in her purse for her grandkids and let J.R. play with it. And then he slept for the first half of the plane ride going from Chicago to Tucson. The only time he got fussy was toward the end of each plane ride, when he was tired of sitting still. But all in all, he did really well. It was much the same on the trip back. I was thrilled, because that eased a great deal of stress for me.
The Arizona trip went pretty well. My mom had managed to get four days off work to spend with us. We mostly hung around at the house, but we made a few short grocery runs to break the monotony of the house. J.R. had plenty of room to practice his newfound mobility, and he did as much of that as he could. They didn't have much that he was not allowed to get into, only the trash can and the laptop cords were temptations we had to keep him from. It was a nice, relaxing trip. It was made better by the fact that it was forty degrees and raining when I left, and I arrived into 75-85 degree temperatures and lots of sunshine. It was beautiful, and such a nice break from the icky weather I had just left.
Well, I think that's about it for this entry. Let me see if I have a good photo... oh yeah, I took some today, here it is!
