Sunday, August 9, 2015

E.J. Walks!

I mentioned in my last post that E.J. learned to walk while we were on our trip!

That may be a bit of an overstatement, as his preferred method of transportation remains his scoot-crawl as of now. Frankly, I think he's just too good at it; he's too fast and efficient to abandon it for a slower, less graceful (if you want to describe the scoot-crawl as such) method. I get that. But, the wheels are in motion.

This strikes me as funny, considering that Ellie learned to walk when she was only about a month and a half older than E.J. is now, while we were on our Midwestern road trip in May of 2013. How strange that both my kids mastered this skill as we drove around the country!

E.J. took his very first steps on his birthday—just one or two little steps towards me to get the video monitor out of my hand. Since then he has done that again here and there, just a step or two every now and again, but nothing really to write home about. He also enjoyed doing some walking while holding someone's hand for the first half of our trip, but didn't seem particularly eager to go it alone.

E.J. and Eric strolling around Idlewild

However, as soon as we arrived in Cleveland, E.J. started going for it. Perhaps he understood how meaningful it would be for him to learn to walk in the same house where generations of kids in our family did just that before him. Perhaps he felt emboldened by his large, captive audience. Perhaps he was just looking for new ways to stretch his legs after spending so much time in the car. I don't know what his reasoning, but I know that all of a sudden, he was doing this left and right:

VIDEO: E.J.'s first real steps, on my grandfather's lanai, July 31, 2015

He got in a fair amount of practice for the rest of our trip, and I loved to watch him move!

Walking around at Pinehurst

But, he has slowed down again now that we're home. That's okay, though. As adorable as he looks stomping around, I know that E.J. up on two feet means its a whole new ballgame around here and frankly, I need to prepare myself. Things are going to get interesting!

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