Ten Months: Let's motor!

Dear Miriam,

Gone is the cautiousness of your first few weeks of crawling, now you go full tilt wherever you want. You still hold that leg up in a skootch position more often than not, presumably so you can easily return to a seated position, but when you really want to get somewhere, you drop the leg and off you go. You chase Moki, you follow our voices from room to room, and your attraction to ethernet cables is frankly unreal.

This has changed your playgroup behavior dramatically. Where you used to sit quietly and watch intently, you are more apt to get in the mix now, and have even experimenting with snatching toys. After weeks of watching toys get snatched, I'm cheering you on, even if some other moms are a bit stunned.

Last Monday you crawled up to a much larger boy and snatched his blue ball away. He seemed surprised, and grabbed it back, but you were determined and took it again. I warded off an attack from his mom by rolling an identical ball past you, and thankfully you went for the moving ball, leaving him in the dust.

You're also standing up on everything these days. When you first started pulling yourself up, you seemed most comfortable doing it on one of us. You soon moved to your baby gates and learning table, and now you'll pull yourself up on almost anything in the house. You're still shy in unfamiliar places, but it's only a matter of time before you're pulling yourself up the play structures at the park.
While your mobility has changed a lot of things -- most notably the house, there are gates everywhere -- it has also made hanging out with you a lot of fun. You love to move from room to room, on your own, and when you discover one of us in your travels, your face lights up into a smile that would melt glaciers.

Moki is astoundingly patient, and you two seem to be evolving a mellow relationship, where you don't grab fistfulls of hair every time you pass each other, and he tolerates it when you can't resist his tail. Yudi, on the other hand, has entered another circle in his own private hell. He watches you in shock and horror, darting up or down the stairs if you so much as look his way. His elusiveness is clearly a drug to you, you cackle maniacally whenever you catch a glimpse of him, compounding his fear, so that you two escalate through a new cycle of hysteria daily. By the end of the day, I need a valium to deal with all that unrequited emotion.

You also seem to be moving your bedtime successively earlier. Our 9 PM party girl is now an 8 PM pumpkin, with clear signs of moving even earlier. This worries us, of course, because if you move much earlier, your Dad may never see you awake. Which would really bum you out, because he is the light and the sparkle in your eye. You listen for him in the evenings, and when you hear him trudging up the stairs, you pause expectantly and break into a gorgeous smile the moment you see him.

You have only slightly less enthusiasm for your grandparents, kicking your feet and grinning broadly whenever one of the three of them enters your world. You seem to love your days with them, you especially like the outings to the park and the mimicry we all do with you. You get a gleam in your eye as you come up with ever more complicated sounds for us to repeat.

Although I can't believe you're already mobile, I am so excited for you and all the explorations to come.

Love,
Your Mom