I know he said it.

Let's not quibble over nasals vs. stops. He was trying to say "Mama" and we all know it. Actually I have about a minute of footage of his practicing the bilabial consonant with an "ah" vowel. He really tried on "Da-Da" too. Totally unexpected, but I think the parental reaction may get us a repeat.

Do you know something, Schroeder?

We sort of hoped our kid would be musical. Turns out we had no idea.

Getting into Mischief

Special thanks to Aunt Julie for her comment. Here are some post-haircut pictures of Paul. He's an adventuresome little chap. He's discovering a whole new world of things he has to stand up to experience. The top of the coffee table, for example, used to hold such treasures. Why Mommy moved the picture frames to the top shelf of the book case is a hard one for Paul to figure out. And now for the pictures.

Paul's a crawler, alright!













He's still fascinated by books.











"Like my toys?"

(Paul LOVES the truck from this set. I haven't taken the three other cars out of the box yet--mostly because it's so cute to watch him crawl excitedly over to the box like "Oh boy! More cars!")







Paul very much appreciates the advantages of being able to stand up to play.













And he enjoyed his carrots.

Dump Truck Ride

Paul has a good time with his dump truck. Here he is getting a ride down the hall.

Crawling Paul

Paul is an official crawler. He stayed in the "Crawlers" nursery Wednesday night and held his own quite well against the older, but not too much bigger, little boys on that side. We've already had our share of crashes, but Paul isn't one to sit and pout about banging his head on the floor. He'll cry initially but squirm to get down when I pick him up to assure him everything is okay. Apparently the danger of the floor is worth braving for the sheer freedom it is to roam around on it.

We're having a great time getting to know this little guy. His favorite pastimes include eating paper and sitting on Daddy's shoulders. We encourage the latter, but he has to sneak in order to indulge in the former. There were a couple of no-nos under a table in the study which I blocked off with a chair. As I sat glibly reconciling financial information, naively assuming that my son was playing with something normal, like a toy, I heard a high-pitched cry indicating that Paul was in need of immediate assistance. I turned around to discover that he had gotten stuck on the lower rungs of the chair in his attempt to investigate said no-nos and was suspended between earth and sky with his knees about half an inch off the ground. If I could only make his toys seem like something he wasn't supposed to have. . .