Fast and Furious

In our experience as parents, we've discovered that when it comes to children, when the changes come they come fast and furious. Lucas has epitomized this theory this past week. Last Tuesday, Marty was collecting the trash from around the house with the baby and plopped Lucas on the bed in our room (as we often do) while he was emptying our trash can. In those few seconds, of course, Lucas took that opportunity to give his first ever display of crawling skills - crawling right off the edge of the bed and onto his face. He had a huge terrible looking purple knot on his head for a few days, which made the event a little less exciting, but as he is with most everything, he was a champ about his injury and it didn't seem to slow him down in the least. Over the next few days he has displayed his non-traditional "inch-worm" crawl safely on the floor. He has gotten pretty speedy with his modified crawl - reaching his arms out, tucking his legs under and propelling himself forward. Not exactly crawling, I suppose, but it does get him from point A to point B efficiently enough that we are suddenly in a panic to baby proof the house.

On the same day of his injury, we made another big discovery - Lucas was getting his first tooth! This is actually pretty shocking, as my family is a bunch of late teethers, so he must have inherited his teeth from Marty's side of the family (which is good because Marty has really straight teeth that required no expensive braces!). Yup, his bottom right tooth is peeking out, making us wonder if his middle of the night freak out at Shoshana's house on Saturday night was tooth pain related. And yesterday I discovered that his bottom left tooth is starting to come in too! Two teeth at 8 months?! Incredible! (I think the average in my family is about 1 year). He also hit another developmental mile stone this week with Oma - he can pat-a-cake! Yes, our little boy is very pleased with himself to clap along to pat-a-cake, something that Elise is going to absolutely adore. He can play a real game!

A few short days later, Marty went in to get the baby when he woke up for the morning and there Lucas was sitting up in his crib! Seems as though he figured out how to sit up on his own literally overnight (and we had to quickly scramble to figure out how to lower his crib so that we could avoid another nose dive!) Since then, he has had no problems moving from crawl to sitting position all on his own. In addition, Luke has enjoyed standing, holding onto the couch or a chair for quite some time, but a few days ago, when I propped him up against the couch he noticed the remote control a few cushions away, and cruised on over and got them. He took many, many steps (holding onto the couch the entire time of course) to reach his destination. When I excitedly told Marty about this, he told me that Luke had actually been cruising around stuff all last weekend (while I was in Austin). Seems like kids always wait to do stuff until you're out of town.

But all the ways that our little boy is growing up don't end there! Yesterday, I put him on the floor of the bathroom while I was getting the bathwater going and he quickly inch wormed himself over to the toilet and pulled himself up to a stand! Now that he's mastered pulling up to a stand, he loves doing this in his crib (I think we lowered it just in time) and is often standing when you go into his room to get him when you get him up from his nap.

Speaking of naps, with all these new tricks, napping has gotten a little trickier. I used to just lay him down in his crib and leave and he'd lay there for a little while and then fall asleep. Seems like the easy napping days may have come to an end. Now, the second you lay him down, he sits or stands up immediately, even when he's really, really tired. It's like he can't stand the idea of just laying there now that he has so many other options.

What we're realizing is that we are wholly unprepared for Luke's mobile stage. I think because he's always been so laid back and lazy we just assumed it was going to be quite a while longer until we had to worry about it. Suddenly, we're frantically trying to get things up off the floor (he loves sticking paper in his mouth and it's a common occurrence that we find a wad of some kind of paper he's hoarding in there because he took a "bite" of a paper that was on the floor), get baby gates back up, remember to close doors and put away all Ellie's small toys.

Lucas and Lauren Sumy Yikes! I think parenting two just got a little harder.