I guess I’ve spent more time with cats than kids.

Ollie.

Dear, sweet, behind Ollie. I hesitate to say it, because I don’t want to jinx him, but ::whisper:: I think he’s catching up.

He’s recently started getting on his hands and knees to scope out the territory. 

Even more exciting, he’s started rocking while on his hands and knees.

And the final success in the perfect trifecta?

He’s taken a “step” with each knee (I think).

He just has to gain some confidence in his abilities and see the light that crawling is more efficient than rolling everywhere. Right now, his uncertain rocking reminds me of a cat getting ready to hack up a hairball.

That’s one of the first things that came to mind when he started doing this? I guess I’ve spent more times with cats than kids.

It’s all starting to come together for the little bugger. And it started with him sitting unassisted. Within the few months that he’s been doing that, he’s blowing through his milestones and baby tasks faster than I imagined. I sort of expected him to take as long to figure out the army-crawl (or even regular crawl) as it did for him to work out sitting.

But, nope, he’s mastering things so quickly that it seems someone told him he has only has about five months to catch up to his peers and he doesn’t want to disappoint.

I went to get him out of his crib one morning, and as I reached his door, I heard a CRASH from his room. A bit startled, I went faster and opened the door to see what the ruckus was…

My little buddy was sitting in his crib (for the first time) pulling stuff off the little dresser next to his bed. The crash I heard was the remote control for his radio being tossed onto the floor.

Opening the door to that was cuter than, oh, I don’t know….

a kitten falling asleep in a teacup or something.

He was just so happy with his new ability!

I just love this kid. Everything he does is pretty awesome.

What worries me — a little tiny bit — is the idea that his getting into trouble is a milestone that we celebrate. Our applause when he figures something new out, whether it’s good or bad, has to be worse than straight-up telling him he’s cute all day long. I mean, are we trying to create a monster here?

No, we’re not, but we are hesitant to discourage him from doing things that kiddoes his age have been doing for months.

Things like exploring the tv cabinet…

This is a place he’s been wanting to explore for months and he’s finally gotten into it!

He finally worked out that sitting in front of it gives him the leverage needed to open the doors. Before that, he was propping himself up on his elbow while laying to fiddle with the handles. He wasn’t successful, but it was a neat puzzle for him to work on.

But today!  Today he was victorious! He sat himself on his dupa in front of the doors and viola! He’s in!

You must be heartless if you think he shouldn’t celebrate his victory and be able to play in the cabinet that houses a ka-zillion magazine, a bunch of cords and wires, the wireless router and, well, everything we don’t want him to find. But how can we cut him off from that, when he finally worked that out?

We let him play with the doors and really get excited that we were actually going to let him pull stuff out, and then shooed him off.

We tied the doors closed with a bit of yarn and he cried.

Poor little man, we’re so mean.