I Would Like To Play With This Fire Poker

It's amazing it took this long. Xander had been doing the whole crawl two steps and then lunge forward for several weeks. He had actually become pretty mobile with that strategy. He would go two steps, lunge, then sit up backwards, then repeat the process. But then he started sewing the seeds of actual crawling this past Sunday, first in the morning, and then again later in the day. He made three to four crawls, but stopped there. Monday, those seeds were planted in full force.

Xander and daddy were playing quietly with his blocks Monday afternoon. Daddy was stacking them as he always does so that Xander can knock them down, so he lost sight of Xander for a minute. But when he looked up, he noticed that Xander was no longer in the middle of the room, but rather all the way in the corner, running his finger across the heating vent (ever since he learned about turning pages, Xander loves running his hand across heating vents or anything with similar ridges). In semi-disbelief, dad grabbed him and carried him back to the middle of the room to see if he would do it again. Like a very slow-moving rocket, he took off once again, arriving at the vent a few seconds later. Xander was crawling!

Monday night was the best night. Mommy came home and together the happy parents watched as Xander crawled about his bedroom from place to place. Every once in awhile, he would crawl to where one of them pointed, but for the most part he had a mind of his own. They shot a video and sent it to friends and family. That night, he slept pretty well. But the next day, the honeymoon was definitely over.

Now that he could crawl, there was nothing in the living room that he couldn't get to. And that was a problem. First, he crawled under the coffee table and bumped his head. Then he climbed over to the stairs, and made his first attempt to go up the stairs. Both were a little concerning, but no real harm was done. And then he crawled over to the fireplace and grabbed the fire poker. Dad was just in time to prevent it from slipping from its hold and landing squarely on his head. But then he tried to do it again right away, and it become clear that Xander was now a full-blown wreckin' machine! Looks like mom and dad have some baby-proofing to do...