Step by Step

This morning Eric decided to take a few steps by himself.  Mauri was walking alongside of him, holding him by one hand, and decided to let go to see what would happen.  Normally Eric immediately sits down and decides to pull himself along on the ground with his unusual crawling style.  Today, though, to our surprise, he kept on walking.  It was a short distance, but he was on his feet alone for much longer than ever before.  So, Mauri tried again, and once again Eric walked a little way by himself. 

He didn’t control his walk very well, and for a few seconds he ended up walking in circles, but he was walking.  When I got home, I decided to try to get him to walk so that I could catch it on video, but he didn’t want to walk more than one or two steps at a time, and he got very tired and ended up on the floor pulling himself around again.  I decided to wait and try again at lunchtime, and I finally got it on video.

As the day went on, though, he got more and more sure of himself, and by evening, when we were walking with him outside, he let go of our hand several times to try to walk by himself.  He also kept pulling himself up and would walk a few steps from object to object by himself.

So, while it’s exciting to see him finally starting to walk by himself, I am a little worried about what that is going to mean.  As it is, he’s always all over the place and into everything; hopefully that can’t get much worse.

As you’ve probably noticed, I decided to change the blog again after deciding that I wasn’t completely convinced by the dynamic style.  Once I realized that there were numerous blog templates available for free online, I randomly picked one and tried it out.  For now I’m happy with it so I’ll probably stick with it for awhile.  I just need to tweak it a little bit over the next few days.  So, to accompany the new phase of Eric walking, the blog also has a new look.

Anyway, here is the video of Eric walking after lunch.  In the interest of getting this video up ASAP, this will be a short post.  There isn't too much more to say anyway.  Eric has been feeling much better lately after spending most of the beginning of the week not feeling completely well and wanting to be in mommy's arms all of the time.  He's had a little bit of a cold, but it doesn't seem to affect him that much.

I'll finish off the post with some pictures of Eric's top two front teeth since I forgot to post them last time.  It looks to me like the next tooth to break through will probably be the upper left lateral incisor, and it will likely be soon! 

With his new teeth, he's also been getting a new appetite.  After several weeks of being a much pickier eater, he is back to trying things and eating quite a bit again.  In fact, this afternoon, after already having eaten quite a bit of his fideuá, he kept trying to walk over to our Clementine tangerine tree so that I would feed him tangerine slices.  He ended up eating three tiny tangerines all by himself, one right after another.  He has already eaten all of the orange ones, so I guess I will have to buy him some more while the rest of our green tangerines ripen a bit more.  It's great to finally have him eating something other than yogurt and bananas again!!