Our son, the jock

Our little guy is advancing in his small and large motor skills so fast it is frightening. He can roll over both directions- which is pretty cool except that once you can roll over both ways, you can essentially tumble off anything. Like Mom and Dad's bed, or the changing table. He hasn't done that yet, but we are wary of the possibility.

Likewise, he has started to do a fairly impressive pre-crawl. This scares me, frankly. I am not in the least bit ready for crawling, and thus, pre-crawling is a bit nerve wracking. This takes the form of stretching his arms forward, scootching butt into the air, pulling knees under butt, and then plowing his forehead downward and forward. This is in pursuit of a toy, of course, and in short order he can move about three feet forward before erupting in frustrated screeches as a result of jamming the crown of his head into the crib's walls. He usually misses the toy entirely, plowing right on by and getting even more frustrated. His speed of movement is pretty impressive, considering the friction he has to overcome from his face and chest still being mostly flat on the mattress. Watching him do it, you can see that all he needs to do is figure out that his push-ups (which he is very good at) need to work with his knee tucking and then he'll be fully crawling. Oh dear.

He's also getting really good at his practice sitting and practice standing. He can practice sitting for a few minutes, as long as my fingers are in his hands (which means my fingers are in his mouth, and he's balancing himself using just his gums). His practice standing is unbelievable- he can stand with just minimal balance control from his hands- about the same skill level as his sitting. He can't get into either a sitting or standing position by himself, but once there, he's quite good at practicing the activity with my or Matt's help.

Cooper also has recently learned that his hands will do his bidding. This is almost always grabbing something and bringing it into his mouth. Exciting objects include his own shirt (a favorite, as it cannot be dropped or lost), his various spit rags, house keys (oooo! jingly!), his elephant toy, his crinkle-bee toy, his pineapple rattle, our fingers (salty!) and Matt's jackets. Matt likes to place his jacket on Cooper's "lap" when he's in the car seat as he takes Cooper to the car. Matt always says, "Cooper, can you hold this for me?" and then says, "Thanks!" as Cooper smiles up at him and joyfully stuffs large fistfuls of the jacket into his mouth. Cooper doesn't "hold" the jacket for Dad once he's in the car (suffocation/choking hazard for sure) so he has to revert back to sucking on his fists or a nice safe toy at that point.

Most of these skills are far ahead of the average baby motor skills chart. What is amusing is that his social abilities (smiling, laughing, cooing, eye contact) are very average and normal.

So basically, he's a jock-baby.

Lastly, I learned a few weeks ago that all the Rad-siblings learned to walk at 9 months old, including the middle child who had to have corrective surgery on his legs (not from the early walking- from a preexisting issue). I'm seeing this coming, I think. That will be just in time for Christmas!