Walking Ruben

"Rocking in the treetop all day long, Hopping and Bopping and singing this song, all the little birdies on Jaybird Street, love to hear the robins going tweet, tweet, tweet, Walking Ruben, tweet, tweedle-dee-dee, Walking Ruben, tweet, tweddle-dee-dee, Go Walking Ruben cause you really want to walk tonight, tweet, tweet, tweet"

Sounds like I have a problem pronouncing my R's correctly but nope, Ruben's on the move.  Yesterday he purposefully stood up in the middle of the room and you could see his little mind contemplating this new viewpoint.  He's been strong enough for weeks to stand unassisted, but never really had the desire to (he would only do it when he was sitting near something and wanted to stand but his hands were filled with toys).  He's also been taking 2-6 steps for about 3 weeks now.  Nothing really motivated him except food but food was so exciting that he'd prefer to dive toward the food or immediately drop to the floor and crawl lickety split over to the food.  Something changed yesterday.  Part of the equation were these super slicky pants he was wearing this morning that made crawling less effective and spending a lot of time on the newly tiled back porch because the weather has been awesome.  The combination of tile and slicky pants made bear crawling or walking much better options than his usual super fast crawl. This morning he continued to stand up in the middle of the room and then move with purpose 2-3 steps toward an object.  A long nap full of contemplation led to a little man who was standing and walking nearly across the room by the end of the night. Crazy.  I'm curious to see what a night of sleep does for his aspirations of walking.

Speaking of sleep, maybe this kid just needed a full night's rest before he was ready to tackle such a huge milestone.  Last night was it.  It was the second night we let him cry it out.  Monday night took about 30 minutes and last night took about 20.  After the crying was over and I was sure he was asleep, I went to make sure he was asleep.  He was asleep (and snoring), but I was appalled to see drops of blood all over his crib including a large pool of slobber blood out of the corner of his mouth.  If he hadn't been snoring, I probably would have screamed and thought he was dead.  Turns out he managed to split his lip while he was bouncing in the crib and crying.  I felt like a horrid mother, but this morning the guilt had waned under the euphoria of a full night's sleep.  He slept til 7:30.  That is unheard of. Nine straight hours of sleep and all of a sudden he's walking across the room.  I can't imagine what he'd be doing if he were a better sleeper.