Four things

The bruise on his face isn't spectacular, but it is noticeable. It is about what you'd expect from a kid falling hard and fast, face first, onto a hardwood floor. Nice and round and purple, just under his eye.

On Saturday morning, something clicked in Cooper's head and he now knows how to do "High 5." He's great at it! He puts his hand right up to yours and grins broadly. Very charming. Matt apparently has been working on this for about a month- I did not know that- and so Matt is feeling very proud of himself for successfully teaching Cooper a cool baby trick.

I'm sad to report that Cooper has officially grown out of his totally awesome car shoes. His little booties with cute tiny red cars on them were getting pretty tight in the last few weeks, and finally yesterday I noticed that he had started to wear holes in the toes. Fortunately, I bought a really great pair of very cool shoes on super-ultra-clearance ($8 for a $40 pair of shoes! Score!) in his next size, sometime maybe two or three weeks ago. I pulled them out on Sunday, thinking of course that they'd be comically too big, and instead they fit pretty well with ample room in the toe. Farewell adorable little car zip-up boots! Hello brown leather sneakers with awesome red flames and racing stripes!

Lastly, Cooper's climbing skills have dramatically, and dangerously, improved in the last few days. He now can very quickly hoist himself onto the kitchen chairs, the coffee table, the footrest in his bedroom, the adirondack chairs on the deck, and perhaps most alarmingly, up onto the baby gate at the base of the stairs. Once on a surface, he immediately stands up. This means that in the last day I've already found him walking casually across the top of the coffee table, standing on a kitchen chair while leaning over to grab a large glass of water from the table, and one or two other gut-dropping unsafe maneuvers. It is amazing and scary. His last frontier will be the couch and chair in the living room, which are about one inch too high for him right now. I bet he'll figure it out in another week or so. Yikes!