A Walker!

Hi everyone!  Well I lied when I said our traveling was over.  We decided to take advantage of a free ticket to fly to Ohio to visit Hayden's grandparents since Nate is still out of town in Iowa.  I was starting to get stir-crazy here alone, and as it turned out Hayden had a really rough time cutting his eye tooth and having a grandma's touch was MUCH needed for both of us.  Luckily his tooth finally came through on Monday and that makes 6 teeth total!  I can tell he is working on another one on the bottom but I hope it waits awhile because it sure makes him miserable.  We are home now though and he is doing great and is his usual happy self.

And now for the good news - he is a officially a walker - even if he looks like a "drunken soldier" as my mom would say - ha!  He will toddle for about 20 steps now and he is just so proud of himself.  I can't wait to catch this on video because it's just wild to me that my little baby is walking!  Wow how time flies.  He has also mastered the art of waving (although he mostly waves to himself - see the video below) and the high-five (thank you to Katie Olson for practicing this with him in Yellowstone!).  We are now working on "so-big" and blowing kisses, but as usual he just reverts to clapping whenever learning something new :)  He is also currently obsessed with flowers.  If there are flowers anywhere in his line of sight he will point to them and say "look" which usually comes out as "gook" or even "ook" followed quickly by a long and loud "ooooohhhhhhh".  And at that point it becomes necessary to take him over to touch the flowers or else you risk invoking a temper tantrum.  Which brings me to his next trick - throwing tantrums.  I didn't realize a 10 month old could do this!  But he sure does and I'm going to have to consult some parenting guides to figure out how to stop it.  So far telling him NO just causes laughter and ignoring him seems to work best.