The All Brick House: 11-month update

As Jed closes in on the big 1-year mark, he continues to make us laugh and is our greatest joy.

The first bit of news is that he can walk! He took his first solo steps last week, and has been practicing and getting better since then. His biggest obstacle is confidence - rather, when there is a lack of it. He stands for longer and walks further when he's not paying close attention to what he is doing, but is quickly realizing that he has the ability to walk on his own. It's really fun to see his eyes sparkle when he takes 7 or 8 steps (which is about his max right now) and is clearly pleased with himself. He usually needs help getting started (someone to stand him in the middle of the floor and let go) and encouragement (someone a few feet away to beckon to him), but occasionally he will voluntarily let go of the couch or coffee table and walk to something that he wants with no prompting whatsoever. What he does NOT do is go from sitting to standing without the aid of something to pull himself up on.

He climbs into/onto everything he can with very little fear. Yesterday I took the cushions off the couch to make him a pile of fluffiness to play in (and so I could throw him onto it, which he LOVES), and he spent much of the day climbing on and off the couch's cushion-less skeleton (on is easy. Off is a little harder, but he figured it out). He'd have climbed right over the back of the couch if he'd been able.

Other places he likes to get into:

But sometimes his climbing gets him into trouble and he gets stuck:

Stuck in the pot - Scott had to pick him up
and dump him out on the couch to free him!

Trying to escape the futon frame.

Resigned to being stuck
in the futon frame.

He has recently been obsessed with a box that housed a Christmas present for Scott - it was a BIG box and had a LOT of packing peanuts. He climbs in and out of it, reads in it, eats in it, stands in it, "splashes" in the packing peanuts, and sometimes wiggles down until he is mostly covered. Today I dumped all the packing peanuts out and turned the box into a tunnel, which was an instant hit. Jed liked it so much that I was hardly able to finish taping it together - he crawled back and forth through it for about 30 minutes, giggling delightedly. I love that all it takes is slightly altering something he already has to create so much excitement.

Other things about Jed:

-He's too big for his infant car seat. He has been for a couple of months now, but I've been putting off getting him a new one. I hate convertible car seats and would rather wait until he can face forward so I can get a high-back booster, but I don't think I'll be able to hold out that long. :(

-He has had his first haircut (that was more than a trim around his ears). It took both Scott and I to do it, but together we conquered the baby and cut his hair.

-Jed eats anything we give him (so far). He has a special fondness for bananas though, and would eat an entire banana for every meal if I let him. He likes picking up the pieces off the table, but prefers to take bites straight off the banana (and tries to shove it as far down his throat as he can, while I pull it back and convince him to bite down on what he already has). Other favourite foods,which he probably likes partly because he can feed them to himself: chicken, cheese, broccoli, beans. He loves anything flavoured with herbs or spices.

-As much as he loves climbing, Jed also loves books and will sit for several minutes at a time by himself flipping through his board books and talking to them, occasionally pulling one up REALLY close to his face (to get a better look? You know how tiny the print is on these baby books - and Jed can't always find his bifocals). Someday he will read books like books, but for now they are pretty much just toys.