First Steps

I was right. He can do it.

For the past couple weeks, Connor has been cruising as much as possible, even using the walls as hand holds to avoid crawling. He'll crawl from the couch to the wall, get to his feet and walk along the hallway to get to his room. I've been avoiding the urge to grab him and shake him and say "walk already!" (Okay, so I only resisted the shaking urge, I've said the words many times).

He's been standing, when he's not paying attention. When I try to stand him in the middle of the room, he'll immediately squat and lower himself to the ground. He's been lifting both hands while cruising, using my hoody string (because it's oh so supportive) as a handhold while bouncing, etc. But, he's been refusing to stand. Over thinking it, or so I've been saying. You can see the wheels turning in his head when I try to get him to stand or walk. He thinks about it, looks around him, considers his options and then plops on his butt and crawls, even though I've been swearing he's 100% capable of walking if he wanted to and have been doing my best to bribe those first steps out of him.

Tonight, though, I finally won the battle of wills. I lifted him to standing, as I've done a dozen times over the past few weeks, while chatting with friends at a small get together, and took my hands away. He stood, squatted, stood, squatted, stood and took a step.

Unfortunately my exclamation of "Ha! I told you!" scared him and he plopped on his butt.

He did think it was pretty cool, though, because he tried it again (twice), but then he got distracted by the toy vacuum cleaner and lost all interest in anything but that for the rest of the evening. At least until he saw the brownie I was holding...