Baby turns Toddler

Well we've been living in one spot for five weeks now- we're feeling the itch to pack up and leave again.

I'm so kidding.

But we'll most likely be moving in September to our real house. We're nervous about the neighborhood- it seems more ghetto than the one where we lived in Columbus. But fewer and fewer houses are coming on the market, and interest rates aren't going to stay low much longer, and in our last two months of looking, we only saw one house that was in a better neighborhood. It was dirty and creaky, and Zach wasn't excited about painting it, so we're going to stick with this one. It's really pretty, and big enough... and has a built-in alarm system...

We've gone to the ward up there for the last three weeks. There are a ton of young families with little kids, so we're excited about that.

Kael has changed a lot since he turned one. He understands a lot of his favorite food words, and "no" and "go." So far the only words I think he really knows how to say are "Mom" and "Dad." He says them to get our attention, and uses the right one for the right parent. :) His favorite thing is to crawl under my legs and head-butt them while I'm working in the kitchen. It's not my favorite thing.

Also, he's pretty much done nursing. We're down to about two minutes at night before I put him to bed, and I don't think he'll be getting anything out of me much longer. It's been a good go- longer than I thought possible for me physically. It's been so nice to just take a few minutes out of each day to feed him in calmer settings. He stopped whacking me and stuffing his fist into my mouth at around 8 months and started softly patting my face and hair instead. When I finally stopped defending my face I started spending the time thinking about how sweet my babies have been, how fleeting their infancy. I'm glad I got to "finish" nursing one of my babies- it really bugged me that all three girls had stopped before I was ready- that my body had stopped before I was ready.

And the biggest change has happened this week: walking!

Okay- more like... stepping. He stands up on his own, but has only taken four steps at a time so far, so we're going to rig up our fruit-snack-dangling-from-the-ceiling tomorrow and see if we can't get him to do more.

Here's the video we took of his first four-stepper. Zach and I are yelling at Anya who had just been told not to bonk Kael on the head with her chicken puppet, so you get some good "reality" in there, too. :b