Jack on the move

In talking to some of you, I have realized that there's been a little confusion about Jack's mobility. Let me be the first to assure you that Jack will not be tied down anymore and can get just about anywhere he wants (except off the bed--we still won't let him jump to his doom, despite repeated attempts to do so). I can no longer turn my back or go into the kitchen while he's in the living room without first thinking about the things within 10 feet of him that would potentially be dangerous to him, as that's inevitably what he'll be drawn to. Electrical cords? Loves them. Trash cans? Never seen one he didn't want to upend. What's the the torts/property law term for those things again? An attractive nuisance?

While he's not yet moving on all fours (he gets up on all fours and moves forward a little, but mostly the going is too slow that way for his taste), Jack is definitely crawling, and he has been for about a month. It happened gradually, not in the light bulb moment that baby books anticipate with their "First time I crawled" with a dateline blank next to it, so I can't put an exact time on when it happened. It's just that he does it in a way that looks like a surprisingly graceful adaptation of an army crawl--elbow over elbow, on his tummy. A little hard to describe, so I decided to post a video. I've been having trouble getting it to run in anything other than slow motion on my computer, but I'm hoping that that's just a problem with my 3 year old Dell (being replaced by a Mac at Christmas), not with the footage. Let me know. In the video it looks a little like we're coaching him, but I promise you we don't have to encourage Jack to get him to crawl.

This weekend we realized that tooth number 3 is now definitely coming through--his upper left one. I've been told that once a tooth breaks the skin it doesn't hurt as much and night waking is less common. I hope so. Forgive me if I sound like an ungrateful broken record, but a full night's sleep is going to be indescribably blissful. Only five more sleepless nights to go!

Oh, and hunger shouldn't be a problem tonight. Today Jack ate 1 cube of carrots and 1/2 a cube of parsnips for breakfast and 2 cubes of sweet potatoes with 1 of cauliflower for dinner. Hooray! This weekend Jack tried avocado, which I'm sure will make his Granddad proud, as he's always proclaiming the amazing health benefits of avocados to anyone who will listen. This week I'm going to give broccoli a try. I've been holding off on it because its one of a list of foods whose high fiber contents tend to cause stomach upset--spinach, for example, is supposed to be particularly rough on babies' tummies. But Jack has been eating lots of other foods with tastes and textures similar to broccoli, so I figure it might be worth giving him a small serving of it. We'll see.