Little dancer

You knew it was only a matter of time. The offspring of the winner of the 1990 St. Stan's Middle School dance contest and an indie-rock junkie was going to have an amazing sense of rhythm. So now that Nate is walking, it was no surprise to us that dancing wasn't far behind. Whether it's the music emanating from his fire truck or a jingle on a commercial, Nate will start bouncing up and down. Of course, his fave is the Michael Jackson "Off the Wall" vinyl Chuck got me for my birthday. And honestly, we haven't even tried to teach him to dance -- it's purely innate (in Nate, get it?).

Walkin' and talkin'

Nate is finally starting to walk! We knew he's been strong enough to walk for months, but just too cautious and stubborn to try. Like his mama, he tends to get easily frustrated when he can't do something. So any time he would try to walk and stumble, he'd just give up because crawling is so much easier and faster. In the past week or so, he started taking one or two steps before falling into our arms. But this morning, he actually walked 6, 7, 8 steps at a time! I think he'll still prefer crawling for now, but he has great balance and I'm sure it won't be long before he's running all over the house!

And we're also starting hear actual words coming out of Nate's mouth. He's been babbling pretty much since he was born. Even before he turned a month old, he started "goo"ing for us, which eventually evolved into the sophisticated babbling we hear today. When he was about 9 months, he seemed to be using "Dada" in reference to Chuck, and a couple months later, I started to hear, "Mamamamamamamamama" only when he was whining (of course). Now he says "duck" and "ball" and I think he also says "yeah." We also know he's linguistically advanced because he enjoys reading the Norton Anthology of Literature:


Even though Chuck never blogs on this site, you have to check out his business website, where he talks about how he tries to "prep Nate for some serious nap time" by subjecting him to punk music.