We can hardly believe it, but about a week and a half before your eleven month birthday you took your first steps. For a week or so after that we couldn’t get you to take more than one or two steps each day, but then on March 7th, it clicked. That night your dad and I sat in the living room a few feet apart as you walked back and forth between us over and over, clapping and cheering yourself on. It was one of those picture perfect parenting moments. Your walking gets better every day and now you’re trying to walk more than crawl…you’ll probably be running within a few weeks — yikes!

One of our recent terms of endearment for you is “little monster.” You are like a tornado, tearing through the house and causing chaos and huge messes every day. Your curiosity mixed with your amazing mobility is causing you to do all sorts of crazy things we didn’t expect to encounter for many more months (or ever)! For example, the other day you walked over to my purse and pulled out my keys. I thought nothing of it since you love playing with my keys and do it all the time. But then you proceeded to carry them into the bathroom, walk over to the toilet and start lifting the lid. I intercepted at that point because I knew it couldn’t go well from there. Where are you learning this stuff?!

The little monster title surfaced about a week ago when your dad got home from work and we were all in our bedroom. Your dad and I were just laying on the bed relaxing, and you walked over to our stand up fan, grabbed it with both hands and started shaking it as hard as you could while yelling at the top of your lungs. We were shocked by this outburst of craziness and both burst out laughing! Then you walked over to our floor length curtains, grabbed those and started shaking them too as if you were trying to pull them right off the curtain rod. Honestly you are so calm and sweet so much of the time, but several times a day you get bursts of insane energy and you’re suddenly bouncing off the walls. Fortunately it’s in a hilarious way not a throwing tantrums way.

I’ve started taking you to weekly story time at the local library to help you learn to sit still, interact with other children, and love the library. So far it’s worked really well. It’s only twenty five minutes long and although the first few weeks you spent more time pulling books off the shelves than sitting quietly and listening, you’ve gotten better every week and have finally learned how to pay attention and sit still the entire time. Success! It does help that we switched to a day that has entertaining librarians — I was struggling to stay awake sometimes with the previous group.

It’s hard to believe that you are nearly one! You certainly keep us on our toes and constantly make us laugh. Oh, how I love you, sweet boy!

Love,
Mama