James has a tooth!

James's first tooth broke through this week.  It's hard to see in the picture, but trust me, it's there.  It's on the bottom, slightly to his right side.  He has been drooling and chewing on things for months now, but the tooth didn't want to come out.  Now that the first one is here, we expect more to follow shortly.  Then we'll all eat corn on the cob together.

James has been working on his walking skills.  He is now an expert at walking while pushing his wheeled toys (he did about 40 laps around the coffee table yesterday), and is very good at walking while holding on to someone's hands (fingers, actually).  He is comfortable enough with this now that he will hold on just with one hand, and carry something to chew on in the other hand.  Daddy gets a lot of exercise (though not much sleep) with James's walking practice.  Though he usually wants to hold onto someone or something,  James has taken up to seven independent steps without touching anything.  Mommy and Daddy sat opposite each other on the floor and helped James walk between us.  One of us would turn him in the right direction and help him steady himself, then let go and let him walk to the outstretched arms of the other person.  He was a little wobbly, but he got better and better at it, finally making it seven steps without falling.  And even when he fell, he enjoyed it tremendously - he landed on his diaper-padded bum on a carpeted floor, so that was fun too.  

This newfound mobility means Daddy has to keep a very close eye on James now, even more than before.  Previously he was hard to keep up with, but I could always assume he was on the floor somewhere.  Now, however, he is learning to climb.  That means Daddy has to watch for vertical threats as well as horizontal ones.  We discovered his new desire to climb last weekend, when he tried to scale the wall of his kennel (see previous blog entries for explanation of 'kennel').  What he once saw as a barrier, he now sees as a challenge.  This morning, he learned how to climb onto the coffee table.  He did quite well (with Daddy spotting), but he didn't really know what to do once he got up there.  So now we are working on our climbing-down technique.  Hopefully James will learn this quickly; right now he's willing to let gravity handle that part of it.  Daddy, however, is not.  

James's tooth isn't visible in the following picture either, but it was a really good picture so Daddy thought it should go on the blog.