OK listen, I let my kid crawl around on the floor in public places...a lot. I make sure he doesn't bug anybody, stick anything horribly foreign in his gob and always have baby wipes on hand once he's done.
I send my love to the spotty kid working his part time job who entertained Henry for a good 20 minutes. Yes, Henry chased the little yellow car for 20 minutes and his hands may have been black when I pulled him away. Baby wipes! It's all good.
Also, I feel a tad bit guilty that I didn't actually buy anything.
But then Henry's Auntie Maggie got him these and I forgot all about my guilt.
So Henry took his first steps last weekend. It was the day before Father's Day and I think Henry was feeling a bit guilty that he hadn't got Andy anything but a scribble drawing so he gave some steps up as a gift. Try as we might, and oh do we try, we haven't been able to capture any of his independent walking on camera. But I swear to you that he's been doing it. No, seriously.
He's training for the UK Crawling Olympics so he can't be seen walking.
This past weekend we decided to head up to Leeds for the day to see Andy's cousin. While we were out and about, I had decided to pop into the Clarks store to get Henry's feet measured. In December Henry was wearing a size (UK) 2 shoe and this spring I bought him a couple more pairs of shoes in size 2 ½ because he seemed to be busting out of the 2's. I've been happily putting Henry's feet in the 2 ½ size ever since. This is why it came as a huge shock to me when the clerk measuring Henry's feet announced that he was a size 4 ½.
“You're joking.”
“No. Well, the right is ever so slightly smaller than the left but he's definitely a size 4 ½.”
“But he's currently wearing 2 1/2's!”
“If you have to struggle to put those shoes on (and I did) and the zipper doesn't stay up (it didn't), then those shoes are definitely too small for his feet.”
“Oh. Oh shit.”
“So what type of shoe are you interested in today?”
“The ones that are on sale please.”
On the left, the shoes I was shoving his feet into. On the right, his new comfortable kicks.
I honestly felt like the worst mother ever for the rest of the afternoon and thoroughly convinced myself that he would have been walking months earlier if he had been wearing footwear that was actually comfortable. To make me feel worse, every single pair of shoes I've ever put on him he was very insistent on taking off the moment I wasn't looking. His new pair of shoes? He plays with the Velcro but is quite content on leaving them on his feet. Worst Mother of the Year, right here please.
My only defense is that my son has inherited Andy's feet. Both of them have these very long Celtic toes that are very good at gripping rocks (way back when blue face paint was in style) or pens off the floor (modern day). I would always put shoes up to Henry's feet before I bought them to see if they'd fit – now I'm realizing that the little guy was curling up his toes (both Andy and Henry do this a lot) when I was doing the sizing. So yeah, basically I was buying shoes sized for a kid with no toes.
In other news, here is Henry's dance. He stopped dancing pretty quickly tonight, but the first 10 seconds should give you the idea. Pardon my heavy breathing in the background, I was trying to stifle my giggles.
Henry makes me laugh. Like, every single day. As each day progresses it amazes me to watch him become more and more like a little human and less and less like the baby in my head he still is. I know that he is, in fact, a little boy. I just think that since babies progress so slowly the first year – we will thrilled at two months when he grabbed for a toy – that having such a spurt in mental growth is shocking. During the first year it took us over a month to feel comfortable feeding him solids – or more to the point, we didn't think HE was comfortable with solids until a month of trying. Now we are trying to have him feed himself with a spoon. After 3 DAYS, he was all over that shit going, “Of course I can spoon feed myself. Duh. I'm not, like, 10 months anymore, MOM.”
"I'll even lick the spoon when I'm done. That's how good I am at this. Please ignore my bib."
With all this mental growth comes humor. Henry, for example, likes to sing. Since his grasp on the English language is pigeon at best, his 'singing' is more of grabbing on to a syllable and carrying it on for as long as he has a breath. We were in the car the other week when Adele's “Someone Like You” was playing. After the high pitch chorus from Adele, a little voice from the back seat started, “OoooOoooooooooooo!” Andy and I couldn't help but laugh our heads off.
Henry also likes to dance. Right now it's your basic Stevie Wonder dance with some clapping. However, if 'In the Night Garden' is on and they get to the end where all the characters get together for a dance at the gazebo, Henry will insist of popping off the couch to do a leg up, side step, leg up, side step dance to it. It's so damn cute, I promise I'll tape it sometime.
One of the many things that will make Henry break out in a dance.
What Henry is not doing right now is walking. I used to be in the camp that babies will walk when they are ready. I've also been told many times that I should be happy he's not walking yet as for as much trouble he gets into now, it will double when he walks. But now, from my standpoint, it's getting to the point where he is ready, and we are taking him, to places where crawling around just isn't practical. On the advice of one of my blog readers, we decided to take Henry to Farmer Ted's. Farmer Ted's is actually pretty great as far as a farm trip goes – it's more like a farm amusement park for the under 10's. While Henry really enjoyed it, having to carry him when he clearly didn't want to be carried was a bit of a pain. There were precious few places that he could just crawl around – whereas he could have walked pretty much everywhere. We practice walking with him every single day and he can do it quite well just holding on to one of our hands (though he doesn't like it and will start whining for both our hands after a couple steps) but he just doesn't seem to want to. Or he's to scared to, though I truly doubt that is true. He's a bit of a daredevil.
"Again! Again!"
He climbs stairs and is getting good at climbing down them. He climbs chairs and gets himself off just fine. What really convinced me that he wasn't scared of walking was how he handled the slide at the park. The first time I really put Henry on the slide, I just placed him on the platform so that he could look around. Instead of looking around for a bit then sitting there asking to be slid down on his butt like I've done with him before, the little fucker dived head first down the slide before I had a chance to catch him. He had a great laugh and I spent the next half hour putting on that damn platform so he could do it over and over again. Does that sound like a kid that is scared of walking?
"I'll even eat prawn cocktail crisps even though I make this face when I do. I'm brave!"
With all the time that he's spent not walking, he has been expanding his vocabulary. We've got 'yes' and 'no' now. 'Yes' (or 'es') is the more popular right now, thank god. He said 'lights' and he's trying to say 'orange'. There's also been a lot of pointing to wanted items (funny enough, many times it's pointing to that damn orange) with a bunch of “I can't believe you can't understand what I'm saying, MOM” babble.
Seriously, this time last year we were THRILLED when he grabbed for a toy. Now our singing, dancing, spoon feeding, orange wanting, head first down the slide, refusing to walk little child is, well, making us laugh....like, every day.
