Nate Update

I try to get pictures of my babies every month for the first year. This is for two reasons, the first is because babies change so much during the first year and I am not so good at consistently taking snapshots of them, so I figure I will for sure get them if I do professional pictures. The second is because I was a middle child and when I look back at my baby pictures there are surprisingly few of them...especially since my mom was into photography at the time. I don't want my children to think there weren't enough pictures of them, so I err on the side of much too many. (My mom is making up for it by taking a lot of pictures of my kids, thanks mom). For Nate's 10 months he got to be involved in the disaster that was the kids group pictures that I posted about a couple of weeks ago. I didn't get to write about his development last month, so I thought I would do a quick post about that.
Nate has been very busy. He finally learned the regular way to crawl, no more army crawl and he is everywhere all at once. I have found him in the bathrooms playing in the toilets more than I want to admit to. (Yuck!) He has two kinds of crawling now..he crawls normal on soft carpet, and can get across the house pretty fast. He crawls like a stink bug on any surface that is less than soft, i.e. cement, tile, grass, church carpet.

He loves to be outside. It has been nice here so I have been able to leave the back door open and he will crawl outside and play out there for a while. He LOVES the sandbox out there. This has also created some problems as we got a rabbit a couple of weeks ago and I have found its droppings in his mouth (yuck, yuck, yuck!)

He is more cautious than our last one was...he is just now getting brave enough to crawl up the stairs (we finally got the gate up yesterday). He loves to pull up on whatever he can get to. He will pull up and then cruise along to get where he is going. I have a couple of times seen him let go, or get half way pulled up and then attempt to stand. It hasn't been completely successful yet, but its definitely in the works.

He is stilll quite social and will smile at anyone, and sometimes we can get him to wave too. He has such a radiant smile, it lights up my day. The other day Joe said that Nate said "hi Dada." I figured if he could say that then he could say "mama," so I tried working with him to say mama. When I said to say "mama" he didn't say anything, he just put his hand to his mouth and brought it out like he was blowing kisses. He also likes to clap. He loves patty-cake and will clap along if you sing it.

He also has the most beautiful blue eyes. They are darker than Michael's and a little bit turquoise. I hope he keeps them, because they are dreamy and I would love to have that color eyes!

His favorite funny noise is the clucking sound. He will mimic you if you make it. If you make kissing sounds at him, he mimics with a clucking sound. So cute.

And like any baby, we love them most when they are peacefully sleeping.