one small step for a boy

Lots of giant leaps forward for Oliver this month, or perhaps that's for his parents. He's sleeping through the night, he's weaned and, drumroll please, he's walking! I let him go barefoot all day yesterday and by late afternoon he was going across the living room unassisted. He still needs something to pull himself up on, and it's still a bit faster for him to crawl, but he's letting go of things and walking on a regular basis so I think we can declare that as of this weekend, Oliver walks.

He had a few more bumps and falls yesterday than is his norm, but this morning I can find no evidence of them.

He's also saying "mum mum mum" more often, though I still can't tell if he means me yet. His words include Dada, uh oh, woo-woo and gee-ga, which seems to mean "Tigger". We have not met Tigger in our nightly reading of Winnie-the-Pooh but Oliver's toothbrush has Tigger on it and we say, "goodnight" to Tigger after brushing. It's an important part of the bedtime ritual (see that first achievement mentioned above).

Finally, he's become obsessed with books, in particular Moo Ba La La La. He will even say, "La La La" at the appropriate point in the book on a fairly reliable basis. Sometimes he just hands it to me and says, "La La". His insistence that we read it five or six (or seven or eight) times in a row is not unusual. In an effort to get him to branch out a bit I took him to the bookstore yesterday to choose a few new books. The three he chose were all by the same author as Moo Ba La La La, but once we got home, after a brief visit with Hippos Go Berserk!, he went right back to Old Faithful.