Leaps and Bounds

So Luke has a tendency to suddenly make a lot of progress in things. For example, a couple of months ago he suddenly was teething, eating from a spoon with out all the mess, holding himself up, and army crawling. This week has been one of those weeks. For the last few weeks I've been working with Luke to show him the different things he can do with his legs and his arms and such. For a couple of days I wasn't sure if it was helping or if he was just confused as to why I was doing these things. All of a sudden, he can do it all! Tyler went down to get Luke out of his crib after a nap on the 22nd of Oct. and he was standing up. That was the first time he'd done it by himself. For a long time he's tried to getting up on his hands and knees when in the middle of his army crawl, but he hadn't done anything with it. About a week after he started pulling himself up to things by himself, he started to try to actually crawl. He still mostly army crawls when he really wants to get somewhere, but when he's just playing on the floor a lot of the time he's up on his hands and knees taking little strides. As soon as he started to do this he figured out how to go from his knees to sitting down. So basically he's all over the place. I'm really proud of him. He gets this very happy look of pride on his face every time he pulls himself up to something, or when he tries to crawl. He laughs and gets so excited and I just love to watch him. I wish pride was all I felt, but it's not. This new found freedom of his is so frustrating at the same time! Luke doesn't play with his toys very much right now, all he wants to do is explore, so his new freedom is seriously limiting mine. He has to play in his crib (which has been moved to the lowest level now) if I have to use the bathroom or something. Also, nap time has become pretty much impossible. I go through the routine and he's all tired and sometimes falling asleep in my arms and then I go to lay him down and he wakes right up and rolls over and starts trying to cruise around his crib. It used to be that if I got him drowsy like that he'd just roll over and fall right to sleep with out objection but now he fights it for hours.

It doesn't help that he seems to be trying to cut all his teeth before his birthday. We noticed a new tooth broke through today right next to his two front teeth and the one on the opposite side is really close too! That will be 6 teeth already!

A couple of other things Luke has shown development in are communication and eating. A couple of days ago I laid Luke down on his changing table and said "Boo!". To my surprise he said "Ba!" right back, then he waited. I wondered if it was a fluke, but it didn't seem like it so I said "Boo!" and he smiled and said "Ba!". I've also been trying to incorporate some sign language into his routine hoping he'll figure out how to use it soon. The one I've used the most is "more" when he eats his solids. I don't know if it is a good sign or if it even means anything at all, but every time I do it Luke laughs.

Also:

And lastly the eating part goes like this: