Ten Months

It may have taken him seven months to roll over, but Fritz is racing toward bipedalism!   He just started crawling a month ago and is already starting with the push-cart.  The big kids love teaching him to walk.

He babbles all the time.  Luckily he's not nearly as loud as Heidi.  For a week, we thought he was trying to say "Izzy" but then his linguistic efforts dropped off when he shifted his energy toward being vertical.  He pulls to stand on everything.

He's also into everything.  A quiet baby cannot be trusted.  Quiet means he's probably destroying the pantry or eating dirt from the houseplants.

The other kids all adore him.  Henry likes it when Fritz hangs out in the office while he watches terrible videos on YouTube.  We can put Henry in charge of Fritz for a few minutes and Henry dutifully follows him around and keeps him out of trouble (of course he still leaves his friggin perfectly choke-able Nerf darts everywhere).   He keeps asking rearrange bedrooms to girls' room/boys' room so he can sleep with Fritz.  We told him we could switch in up later this winter when Fritz isn't nursing anymore and is (hopefully) sleeping more reliably, and Henry wept REAL TEARS at this suggested delay.  Ingrid loves to pick Fritz up and move him from place to place like Olivia moving Edwin the cat, which Fritz does not particularly enjoy.  Heidi is his BFF.

He still loves being outside.  We planted roughly 1000 flower bulbs this month and he happily crawled around and ate dirt while we worked.  I miss seeing his soft arms and legs in summer clothes.  But he can really rock a fall sweater.  It's too bad he'll start dropping the morning nap just as the weather gets too cold to be outside much; it would have been really awesome to work in some short stroller snoozes while walking around the lakes.

Fritz loves to eat and loves all the foods.  Even bananas are back in favor.  He's eating a lot of vegetables right now, so holy cow, the diaper changes are intense.  He will eat a wide range of flavors but doesn't like anything spicy.  We love to go out for lunch and he's a perfect, if messy, little gentleman in a restaurant.

The next few weeks are going to fly by as we start racing into birthday and holiday season.  Hard to believe he'll be turning one in this middle of this stretch.  I'm in denial that the baby won't be a baby for much longer.

postscript: two hours after I originally posted this, he started saying Izzy again, clear as day!