Week 32

Oct 14-20

This has been another exciting week in Jack's milestones!  He has officially crawled for the first time.  Ed REALLY wanted Jack to wait until he came home from GA, but unfortunately he decided to crawl the day before.  He just couldn't wait I guess.  Luckily...we were on Skype.  Let me start from the beginning.  I had been telling Ed about how much Jack gets around since he left.  He wanted me to just put him on the floor with some of his toys while we were talking and he could see him in the background on his camera.  Well we were talking about our day and he was like "look at Jack!"  I turned around and he put one hand out and then moved his leg, and crawled a few feet on the floor.  It was like he had done it all along or something.  Amazing!!!  We were so excited!  Ed got caught up in the moment and was really happy, then after a minute he got this look on his face.  I asked him what was wrong and he sounded disappointed and said, "nothing."  I realized and said, "you really wanted to be here didn't you."  He said yes and was very sad about the whole thing.  But at least we technically witnessed it together, even if it was on camera for him.

I promise I will get some video soon.  Now we definitely have to "baby proof" the house.  Yes, I still have not done that yet.  What can I say, it has been very busy around here with everything and I will get to it very soon.  Luckily Jack is never unsupervised so it has not been a problem.  The real safety problem is what Jack discovered last night.  I have been saying since Ed got home the other day, "we really need to lower his crib mattress b/c he will be pulling to stand pretty soon."  I have noticed that he gets over to things like the coffee table and attempts to pull himself up, but he has never actually done it yet.

Well, last night at 3:00am Jack started screaming so I got out of bed to see what was wrong.  I go into his room and there he is, standing up holding onto the rail.  I freaked out b/c he could have probably jumped out with enough momentum.  Ed had woken up too and I called him in there and said, "look at your son."  That is what I like to say when Jack is doing something he's not supposed to.  :)  Haha!  Ed was like, "that's it, we have to lower it right now."  Jack was wide awake anyways so we flipped on the light switch, found the allen wrench, and attempted to lower the crib mattress.  No problem, right?  Hahaha!  I guess we had forgotten how difficult baby stuff was to put together.  An hour later we had the mattress lowered and the bedding put back together.  We put Jack back in and he looked around like "whoa...this is not my bed."  He went back to sleep and just as we were going back to our room the alarm clock started going off.  Ed sarcastically exclaimed, "perfect timing."  Poor guy.  He had already been up last night trying to finish his paper since he was too sick to do it the day before.  Here is Jack before the crib mattress was lowered...

Long story short, Jack now knows how to crawl and pull to stand all in 3 days.  Maybe tomorrow he will be running or skipping.  Who knows?  Babies are so amazing and fun.  I love to look at his face when he gets going.  It's like everything clicks in his head and he has finally realized how to do the thing he has been wanting to do since day one.  He's really getting fun.  Today on his exersaucer toy I asked him, "where's the monkey?"  He looked at me, looked at the monkey, and grabbed it.  I started clapping and screaming and he was so excited!  I think we are going to start working on word identification and recognition.  He loves books so I need to start reading to him more and pointing things out in the pictures.  It's hard to find books with simple, big pictures.  So many of them have so much stuff cluttered on the page you can't focus on what you are trying to point out.

Another big milestone was the purchase of the "big boy car seat."  Jack's infant carrier is supposed to go to 30 lbs so I thought it would last a little bit longer (he is only 20 lbs now).  Well I didn't take into consideration that I would probably have quite a tall kid.  I noticed that all of a sudden Jack wasn't so excited about riding in the car.  He would cry when I put him in his car seat.  He was too big!  So I did my research and ended up ordering an awesome seat that goes all the way to 100 lbs and can accommodate a tall child.  It is called a "convertible seat" and has so many adjustments you can make on it.  Supposedly it goes from 5-100 lbs, but I really don't think I would have been comfortable with a newborn in it.  Even a very large newborn like Jack would have been swallowed whole.  It does recline into 3 different positions which is quite nice when it is rear-facing...especially if they fall asleep and you don't want their little heads to droop down.  I really like it.  Jack LOVES it!  He can see out the window, he has so much more room, he puts his little arm on the armrest like a pro.  He looks so much more comfortable.

I have to admit though, I was really excited for Jack until I actually had to physically remove his baby car seat out of the car.  I started to get really sad.  I don't know if it is because that baby item is so symbolic.  It's one of the first things we got off of our registry and I can clearly remember when it came in the mail along with the matching stroller.  Ed and I took them out of the boxes and put everything together.  We carefully read all of the instructions and imagined carrying our new baby home in the carrier.  Sooo cute!  I can even remember Ed rolling the stroller around the living room testing the "shocks" and the maneuverability.  Yes, it was very sad.  I keep telling myself that one day we will have another baby to put in that car seat, but for now I had to put it up in the closet.