Alec at eight months

All of a sudden, we have a baby on the cusp of mobility. This is astonishing, given that he has spent the past month perfecting the ability of capturing seemingly out-of-reach toys without ever moving his butt off the ground, using techniques ranging from stretttching his torso out until it's parallel to the ground to pulling the blanket under the desired object towards him until it's in reach. A few times, he's leaned forward and wound up on his hands and knees, but he looks utterly perplexed as to what he should do next. He spends enough time attempting to wiggle across the floor before giving up and screeching in frustration that I'm no longer quite as sure that he'll just skip crawling, but I certainly don't see it happening any time soon.

But our sedentary baby has a passion for standing upright, and after a prolonged period of pulling himself onto his knees, and pulling himself to stand from his knees, in the past couple of days he's managed to put it together to pull himself completely to standing. Once there, he doesn't precisely cruise deliberately yet, but he manages to move through some sort osmosis where we look away and suddenly he's moved a foot somehow. He does the same thing on the ground as well, somehow oozing several feet over the course of a play session without ever lifting his butt off the ground.

He spends a great deal of his day sitting surrounded by toys, picking them up in turn and examining them with intense scientific interest before putting them through various stress tests. He has perfected his pincer grip, the better to pick up small overlooked objects just the perfect size for choking. He has eight teeth now, but despite happily eating as much mushy food that we will spoon into him, he isn't really ready for anything more solid yet.

We're definitely seeing some separation anxiety. He can be entirely happy playing on the floor until one of us moves into his sight, which reminds him that he's unbearably lonely and abandoned and must be held by a parent. He still happily flirts with strangers, but there are times he only feels safe doing it from my arms, and he has perfected a particularly devastating move where he hides his face in my shoulder and then peeks out at people and smiles, to universal devastation. He has an extensive fan club at all of the places we go regularly.

His personality isn't always sunny - he has a drama queen streak where the weight of his extreme woe is so great that he has to lay his head on the floor when he cries. Diaper changes having been accompanied by piercing shrieks lately for no better reason than he just doesn't like to be lying down when he could be up with a will for doing instead.

He's been doing the typical babbling and vocalizing for his age. This morning, however,B was changing his diaper to the usual strenuous protests, and when I came over to him, he said a very definite "Mama." I'm not given to trying to hear words in babbling, but since all of the other sounds he was making were more along the lines of shrieks and nothing like the sort of babbling that could be mistaken for a word, and B heard it as well, I'm going to call the first word. It's exactly the same word, at exactly the same age and same circumstances as K's first word.

It's hard to believe how fast Alec is growing and changing, both developmentally and physically. He's already starting to outgrow the 12 month clothes I just finished buying him (Dear son: if you could please wait to bust out of your clothes until warm weather hits so I only have to buy one new set of clothes, I would be ever so grateful). But he's still my little baby: