Crawling!

Calix has been working on crawling for a long time, but I think that as of this morning, we can officially say that he really has it down.

The baby in the mirror

Calix and the baby in the mirror clearly both want the same thing.

Mostly post-partum

A big milestone for Calix passed unnoticed on Monday – Calix has now spent more time outside of me than inside of me. Conception to birth was 37 weeks and 4 days, and Calix is now 38 weeks old.

Getting into stuff

Even though Calix isn’t consistently crawling, he clearly has the urge to explore. He loves playing with the laundry basket, standing at the side of it and going into it in search of treasures.

First Halloween

When we were home in Ohio, Jenni and I decided to put together some Halloween costumes along similar themes. Jenni made a sun costume for Robert and a moon costume for Elizabeth. Since Calix doesn’t have a twin, he had to be both the sun and the moon.

We went trick or treating in a big cadre with the other babies and parents from our PEPS group.

Calix and all of the other babies loved his costume, because it was shiny, and it had jingle bells on it. Calix of course thought that it would be best if he could eat the costume. It’s amazing that the costume made it through 2 halloween parties given all of the tugging and mouthing it got over that time.

Calix also enjoyed chewing on the crinkly candy bar wrappers. We enjoyed the candy

Living in the future

We tell Calix a lot about how he lives in the future. Stuff like:

“Calix, you were born in the future. By the time you were born, we already had a robot to do the vacuuming for us.”

“When you were born, we were so far in the future, that we texted a bunch of people to let them know that you had arrived. We also made a blog entry, and told everybody your email address.”

Of course if nothing changes quickly, we’re going to have to explain to him about how he can possibly be living in the future when he doesn’t have his own personal jet pack. I mean, that is certainly something I expected to have by the time I was an adult.

The Verl Family

We are very sad to be saying goodbye to our dear friends the Verls, who are moving from Portland to Indiana. Sue and Verl have been holding down the fort in Portland, getting the house ready to sell. They came up to visit a couple of weeks ago.

Family visit in Ohio

We went to visit the family in Ohio a couple of weeks ago and were very glad that we were able to arrange for Jenni and the twins to be there as well.

Swim lessons

Calix loves his swimming lesson. Since he’s on the small side and wasn’t fond of baths, we were a little nervous that he would hate swimming lessons. But a couple of weeks before swim lessons started, he discovered that baths are a place where splashing can occur. And from thence on, he has adored baths. I think it was because of this that he ended up loving swim lessons. Maybe he took one look at the pool and thought “giant bathtub!”.

We practice all kinds of things in our swim class, like kicking, back floating, reaching out for toys,

getting water poured over our heads, and falling into the pool from the side.

But Calix really just sees it all as a distraction from the main goal, which is to splash.

Calix’s friends from PEPS – Alder and Lily – are also in the class with him. Yay!

Pulling up

About a week ago, I watched Calix pull up to a standing position for the first time. It was really cool to see!

Calix’s current most-favored toy is a tripod activity console given to us by Sue, Michael, and Verl (as most of our toys were). He stands at it for long periods of time, playing and playing.

On that day, he was sitting near the console, and worked his way over until he had one hand on the console. It was clear what he wanted, and I was tempted to help him, but I decided to just watch and see what happened. Over several minutes, he managed to skootch himself over, get his feet under him, and slowly wrench his body up. When he was halfway up, he had to do some really fancy footwork to get his feet in a position to support his weight, but he did it! And then there he was, standing at his console, just like he wanted. I was so proud of him . And glad that we put the crib mattress down just 2 days before!