Ethan - Month 9, Week 4

Boy has Ethan been on the move this past week. Ever since he got the army crawl down, he has been off to the races! The positive side of all this activity is that he is napping like a champion these days. His morning nap is lasting over two hours and his afternoon nap is now around an hour and a half. The only disruption to this was that he caught a little cold for a few days (nothing serious, just a runny nose) and he wasn't sleeping all that well while he was congested. I can't really blame him though, because I don't sleep all that well when I'm all stuffed up either.

Since Ethan is so mobile now, babyproofing has begun in a hurry at our house. It's amazing the things that I already had ready (outlet covers, etc.) in which he shows absolutely no interest and the things that I didn't think about (the cat food bowls) that he makes a beeline for every day. We've gotten creative with some things (moving speakers around) and given up on others altogether (keeping anything on the metal shelves underneath our coffee and end tables) in order to accomodate Ethan's newfound mobility. Poor little guy has some small bruises on the underside of his arms (near his elbows) that I can only assume developed from all this crawling. Since I saw his arms I've been trying like crazy to keep him off the kitchen and wood floors and only on the carpet. Hopefully it will help...I felt terrible when I saw the marks on his arms.

He is also pulling up on anything and everything these days. His latest favorite is when we are upstairs he goes straight for the window that overlooks the driveway and pulls up on the window sill so he can look out over the cul-de-sac. It makes me really nervous to have him by the window like that (it is closed and locked, but it's still glass) but as long as he's not hitting it or banging his head on it and I'm right there with him I guess it's okay. I keep moving him to play with other toys and he keeps going right back to it. He definitely has a favorite spot where he's not supposed to be in every room. My little troublemaker....ha!

Ethan does get up on all fours (in the true crawl position) frequently now and will rock back and forth but when he is ready to move he'll drop down and army crawl (very quickly I might add) to wherever it is that he wants to go. I wonder if he'll ever do true crawling. If he's this mobile now though, I'm kind of scared to see what happens when he starts walking.

The funniest thing that Ethan did this past week was clean out one of my drawers. He loves pulling things out of drawers and since my pajama drawer is on the bottom (and up until this past week has been highly disorganized) I opened it up and let him pull things out. He was in heaven! After a few minutes of this, I started folding the things as he was pulling them out, organizing them, putting together a pile for donation. Ethan was occupied for almost a full hour with this game and I ended up with a completely organized drawer by the time all was said and done. We might have to work on a different drawer every day - Ethan will be my little organizer!

The weather has been beautiful lately so I've been taking Ethan outside to read under our peach tree most days. It's so funny though - he does NOT like to have his feet touch the grass. He is perfectly content to sit in my lap and pick at the grass, but the second I try to let him stand in the grass (with bare feet) he picks his legs up like he's sitting cross-legged even though he's suspended in mid-air. I am going to have to capture this on video because it cracks me up.

This should be a fairly low key week coming up. We don't have too many plans which is good - I definitely need some down time before all of the summer craziness hits. I'll try to get my pictures from this week uploaded sometime soon so that I can add them in, but for now this will have to do. Have a great week!