10 months already?!

Austin, shocked at all of the things he's learned lately!

Well, the new tricks keep on coming.  Austin's crawling pretty much everywhere now...and fast.  He oddly loves the vacuum (whether its actually vacuuming or just sitting in a corner), and follows it around as we're cleaning the floor.  Its a good thing it doesn't freak him out because we seem to need to vacuum all the time these days - his little fingers will pick up every speck on the floor!   

My new crawling skills

Of course, now that he's learned to crawl, he has a new frustration.  He can pull up to stand, but doesn't always pick stable things (or safe things) to pull up on and sometimes when he's up he can't figure out how to get back down.  But, he's getting better at it literally day by day.  This weekend he finally figured out how to squat to get back down.  I think he's building quite the leg muscles by constantly standing and squatting.  Maybe I should join him to give my own legs a workout!  Here he is quite proud of himself for getting down from the fireplace ledge.  Not the safest place to climb on, but with supervision he seems pretty happy to just go up and down over and over again. 

He's getting more and more confident on his feet.  Still not 'cruising' really, but balances pretty well holding on to something with one hand, and moves his feet forward if you hold on to his hands and help him support his weight.  I have a feeling he's going to be more mobile pretty soon.  Which will make it alot harder to a) change his diaper (which is already pretty tough and usually results in tears) and b) take his picture.  I used to play alot with the apeture mode to get the fun blurry background and now I'm trying to get better at the shutter speed mode to catch his quick movements.  Speaking of photos - we did get some good 10 month shots the other morning:


Kneeling, hands free!

Checking out our soon to be new floor. 

This kid loves the lids for his bottles.  Who needs toys when you have bottle lids?

Attempting sticker removal

Haha, I took his bottle cap and he's trying to get it back!

We've had alot more indoor time lately since the weather has been snowy and cold.  Not snowy and cold enough to actually go sledding though.  A couple we met through the meetup group wanted to see if we'd join them for weekend waterbaby swim lessons, which seems like a great plan for the winter.  Our first class was this past Sunday, and was pretty fun.  It involved alot of singing and a little bit of tears, but we think it'll help get him more used to the pool...particularly before summer when our neighborhood pool opens.  He definitely hated floating on his back and he didn't really like getting his face too close to the water, but by the end of the 'lesson' he was mimicking us putting our faces in the water to blow bubbles.  Except that when we blew bubbles he would drink the water...pretty easy mistake though!  We opted out of dunking him underwater during the first class...maybe next time.

Next month is quite busy...Mike's away this weekend, I'm away next weekend, and we're all going away to see Grandma and Grandpa the following weekend.  Before we know it, Austin will be 11 months!