Alex is 10 months old today! And he’s enormous. We haven’t weighed or measured him recently, but we can tell that he has grown substantially by the fact that he can reach well up onto all the tables in the living room. And he wants to get up onto the TV cabinet so badly that quite often he will grab hold of the edge, pull himself up to his tippy toes and jump up. I’ve seen both his feet leave the ground.

He now has five teeth through, the first two at the bottom front matched by three of the top front teeth.

Over the weekend we were playing a lot of walking games with him. If we line the block trolley up properly, he will use it to run all the way across the living room. He also thoroughly enjoys sitting on the block trolley and being pushed back and forward between mommy and me. He laughed himself silly doing that yesterday afternoon.

Alex climbed all the way up the stairs today! And without any assistance, either. He had his grandpa Foley behind him all the way to catch him if he fell, but there was no pulling or pushing involved. He just clambered his way to the top, one step at a time. Wow.

Still no real sign of him walking, though. He has mastered the art of crawling about on his hands and knees (he was still commando-crawling last time I wrote anything here), but that seems to satisfy him for now. He can get everywhere he wants by just crawling, so why get up onto his feet and toddle?

Sooner or later, though, he’ll figure out that by walking he can still get everywhere–only faster.

I can hardly believe it, but just in the last two days (since we got back from Chollerford), Alex has started climbing things. Every thing. So long as it has something he can grab onto, he’ll wrap his chubby little fingers around it, and pull himself up to his knees. Occasionally, if he can get a very good grip, he’ll pull himself up to his feet.

Before this weekend, he had still just been commando-crawling with his feet and elbows. He was pushing himself up to his hands and knees regularly, and then falling sideways, catching himself in a sideways reclining position.

But the sudden push towards the vertical is a real quantum leap. From one day to the next it seems like his development has moved forward by a month. Wow.