mamamama

Peter is 7-months-old now! So much goes on:

He's been making a scary amount of progress with locomotion and grabbing. He did his first 360 roll April 14. It took him a while to figure out that he could use this skill to get anywhere in the room. He seems to have radar for the things in the room that are expensive, dangerous or both. So, he'll roll straight up to the computer cord and either eats it or try to pull the computer onto his head.

He doesn't seem to be very interested in crawling. He's much more interested in standing. He will try to pull himself up with any object. He doesn't yet have a good sense of which objects work for this and which don't. (e.g. side of the crib, good. kitty, bad.)

He will sit, throw himself forward into the crawling position, and then try to stand rather than crawl. New this week: he learned how to get back to sitting after throwing himself into crawling position. He used to hit the crawling pose, fall onto his stomach after his arms tired, roll onto his back and yelp to be sat up. This weekend I saw him combine this set of skills. He rolled over to an object he wanted, rolled to his stomach, pushed up through crawling position and back to sit.

He can also scoot on his butt when he's sitting. He surprised me with this one two weeks ago. It was raining and I sat him in the middle of the bed to close the window. I figured it was safe: queen-size bed and only long enough to close the window. Wrong! He scoots to the edge of the bed and dives onto the hard-wood floor. Bad Mommy took him to the doctor. He cried the whole way, then proceeds to flirt, coo and giggle at the receptionists, nurses and Dr. -- who are all like, 'Why are you wasting our time, lady.'

Today, I actually saw him scoot himself & his rocking chair across the kitchen to try to pet the cat while strapped into his chair.

Over the last week or so, he's been making consonant/vowel combinations-- rather than just vowels. So, we've heard our first mamama and bababa and full blown baby talk words like abagaba.

He has 2 teeth now: bottom front. The first one came in April 17 and the second one on April 21. He can bite quite hard. a couple of weeks ago, Daddy sported a band-aid to school for all to see.

Over the last month we traveled to Florida, Maryland and Philly. Peter had his first trip to the beach, rode his first merry-go-round, saw King Tut's stuff and watched St. John's cream the Navy at croquet. By the way, if you want to crash parties and be offered lots of free champagne, show up wearing a cute baby! Click here to check out all the new pictures of the young prince. No croquet pictures yet -- they are on Aunt Gretchen's camera.