6 months

Alexander turned 6 months old last Thursday. It's amazing how time flies! In another major lanmark, yesterday morning he managed to pull himself from sitting to standing using his crib railing. It's the first time I've seen him successfully pull himself up using something other than a human who can help him balance.

He is enjoying being mobile, and continues to crack me up. Here's a little snapshot of an evening with Alexander....

I put him down by his play gym, and then sat down on the floor on the other side of the room to work on putting his carseat cover back on the carseat. He started fussing, and when I looked up to see what was wrong he had belly-crawled halfway to me and was fussing that I wasn't paying attention to him. I called him to come on over, and he grinned and started wiggling faster and crawled over to me and I put his arms up over my leg. That wasn't good enough as he kept fussing, so I pulled him up across my lap and that seemed to be what he wanted. He lay quietly across my lap for a few minutes just chilling, until something caught his attention and he wiggled off of my lap and crawled over to the door to the dining room.

He had found one of the cat toys - a little loop of wire with some cardboard danglies on one end! What could he do with this? He picked it up and banged it on the floor a few times, and passed it from one hand to another several times. Mal came and laid down next to him and batted at it, then wandered off. Alexander started crawling forward with the toy in one hand and then noticed the cat door in the door that leads to the basement. He crawled over to it and looked at if for a few seconds, then looked at the toy in his hand. Door, toy, door, toy. *lightbulb!!!* He put the cat toy through the cat door and dropped it.

Now what to do? He looked around and crawled over to play with his little farm toy, the kind where you push a lever and the door pops open and shows you an animal. Then he pushed his diaper box around for a little bit. Then he took off down the hallway and picked up the shears that were still there from my earlier attempts at repairing the fence. I took those away from him and put him down in the middle of the kitchen floor, and he made a beeline for the cat's water fountain. I put the fountain up on the table, then took the piece of gravel that he'd found in the meantime out of his hand. He started crying because I took all the good toys away, so I sang him some songs and he happily watched while I sang and unloaded the dishwasher. He then crawled over to where I was standing and grabbed my legs and started whining again, so I picked him up, gave up on getting work done, and went to cuddle in the rocking chair while we waited for Daddy to get home from class.