He Walks!

At the ripe old age of 14 1/2 months, James is officially a walker-yea!  He took his first series of steps back in January and didn't do much more than that until this week.  He started doing 4-6 steps on his own before slowly sitting down, but always with someone prompting him.

The last few days, Karianna has been insistent on giving him walking lessons-she uses an exercise ball for him to stand up on, then she rolls it away, and he walks after it.  It was pretty ingenious, honestly!

Today he started taking some steps unassisted-I'd catch him letting go of something and walking a few steps into the middle of the room before sitting and crawling the rest of the way.

Thus, I decided to press him. Under the temptation of empty go-squeeze pouches, he took 10 steps on his own, then 15, then 20.  Ah man, we were mean-continually backing up when he reached his goal (which incidentally was empty!).  He would wobble, get distracted, and halfway lower himself until we started saying, NO, stand James! Each time, we managed to keep him going.  It was looking promising.

  The deciding factor came moments ago.  James was standing at the kids' table near the kitchen, and he saw me coming out of the hall from the bedrooms.  He smiled a huge grin at me, let go and just started toddling over to me-must have been upwards of 25 or so baby steps.  No encouragement from anyone, he saw something he wanted and was determined to get it.

I'm a hot commodity, apparently.

So we can officially say James is a walker!  I'm sure it will be a few days before he is solely walking, but he's definitely on his way.  Guess I better dig up some shoes for this buddy....