Happy ten months!

We celebrated four years of marriage and ten months of Taiyo last weekend. Fall colors with starting to show at our cabin in the sierras. It was a wonderful quiet weekend with just the river and rocks to keep us company.

The cabin is a spiritual place for me - one I've grown up with since I was Taiyo's age. I love watching him watch the world.

On the move

Taiyo regularly crawls down the hall and around corners to greet me when I return home. He has begun to finally master the physical skills of crawling, which is opening up a whole new mental challenge for him - how to conceptualize physical space.

He's long been able to figure out that when I hide behind something, I'm still "there" and that only his vision is blocked. But now he is thinking about the concept of corners, rooms, vertical height and all the complexities that brings as he experiments with moving through space.

It is really amazing to watch him grasp the layout of the house and quite stunning to see him crawling off to favorite places.

So that's what these opposable thumbs are for!

Just as Taiyo was learning to crawl, he was also paying attention to the stuff we keep shoving in his mouth day after day. Some babies seem to set about feeding themselves early, wanting nothing more than to be left in piece with a nice piece of bread.

Taiyo's journey into feeding the hunger has been slower. He took a long time to really associate anything we gave him as food he could put in his own mouth.

But the power of the banana overwhelmed in him the end it seems. Now he is enjoying learning to munch on crackers, bread, broccoli, various fruit, and on and on.

As part of this new found empowerment, we are moving from two to three solid food meals a day from tomorrow.

Scale the Mountain

I am one of many things Taiyo has set about climbing. As I mentioned in the previous post, he seeks it as a personal test to figure out what it takes to scale any peak. How high he will go is still anyone's guess.

Riding High

Taiyo can sit and stand and crawl and (almost) walk. He loves nothing more than physically interacting with the things around him.

Usually he does this by pulling himself up and over barriers or even banging his head against the wall just to see what happens.

The world reacts is something he really gets. Now he is bent on figuring out just how it will react. He will test and push the limits for years and years to come.

A shaking sea-horse is no match for this cowboy.

Back!

We're back! It was a long trip but we are safe and sound back home again. Taiyo has changed so much in 1 1/2 months. But the biggest change has to be that he is now crawling!!!

We are busy re-arranging the house as life as we know it once again takes a big turn in the road.

Taiyo celebrated his ninth month in August. To mark the occasion he knocked back a cold frosty beverage.



We will now return to regularly scheduled Taiyo updates.