Growing Up

In the last couple of months, Evan has made huge strides on all those fun little developmental milestones parents love to fixate on so much. It has been such a joy to watch him explore and learn to do new things...though of course it's even more exhausting now that we have a bustling baby boy who is curious about everything and gets into lots of things he should and more things he shouldn't.

But first, here's our Evan at 7 months:

At the end of January he really started to come into his own with his babbling. This, as you can imagine, was music to my speech pathologist ears. Oh, consonant strings and vocal play, how I love thee so. My favorite thing is when he mutters, oh so softly under his breath, "ah-dah, ah-dah, ah-dah" when he's concentrating on something really hard or is about to get into something fun, as if in anticipation of the excitement to come. And once, just once, Evan turned around and happened to look directly at Dave, and said "Hi Dad!" - no lie. Obviously that was just a fluke but it was nice to pretend he knew what he said!

This was taken one day at the zoo, as Evan was exploring his new world of finger foods and the pleasure of feeding himself, when apparently the excitement overcame him and he burst into babble.