This last 10 to 14 days has been absolutely nuts in Eli-land. Our little explorer has finally unlocked the ability to really get around. His army-crawl phase was very short-lived as Eli has started full-on crawling now! It's definitely not going to score high on artistic merit but with each passing day he's getting better and better at it. His crawling ushers in a whole new wave of paranoia about baby-proofing around the house and means we REALLY can't take our eyes off him. I swear he's like Nightcrawler from X-Men. If I turn around, I hear a "BAMF!" sound and Eli somehow teleports across the room.
Now that he's learned to crawl, he can also sit up by himself. He could always sit himself back up from the all-fours position but getting him into that position was the hang up. He seems to have pretty complete command of getting around at this point and he's done very little face-planting lately.
We've known for months that he likes to stand up and support himself but I'd started to wonder if he hasn't been pulling up very much because there's not a lot around our house for him to pull up on. Sure enough, we go to visit some of Rebecca's college teammates and Eli starts pulling up on things in their den. Just a couple days after that visit Rebecca walked in the nursery to find him standing in the crib, holding on to the railing, and crying. Yes, it was totally pitiful but it was also a watershed moment.
Eli seems to have grown an opinion about a lot of things. His personality is really starting to come through. We are starting to get a feel for his likes and dislikes because he's certainly not shy about letting us know when something isn't agreeing with him. Maybe some of that is due to teething because he definitely has a top tooth breaking through. For some reason, Rebecca seems to think babies look weird when they get their top teeth. We'll see if that's the case.
