Kid's corner

This weekend Nathan took four steps all by himself, without any means of support. After that, it turned out to be faster when going down to all fours :-)

He also got new shoes, as the old ones were clearly too small. Two sizes too small.

The last weeks, Nathan has steadily increased the times he tries to walk around. He is mostly still holding on to his surroundings, but he does manage to stand up all by himself. The first step following that ... not quite yet. But when a man cannot walk, he can surely climb. He can get up the staircase all by himself (with either me or Veerle standing behind him, just in case). And today he demonstrated why it is not a good idea to leave Elias' (small) chair in the vicinity of the table. Clearly, if the table it too high to climb onto, one needs to use the object in the middle: the chair.

The highest tower Nathan built today, before deciding that allowing gravity to exert full control over the blocks used, was 5 blocks. The trick to keeping him building lies in providing him with new blocks before his brain can decide that his hand needs to hit something. Preferably something near the base of that cool tower.

Nathan is really, really happy to see his mom when she comes home after a hard days work.

After having been ill for the past weeks, both Elias and Nathan have regained a number of hit points. Sufficient to allow them back to school and kindergarten, respectively.

Nathan just managed to stack four Duplo-like blocks on top of each other, without parental intervention. I'm not sure, but should a one-year old be able to do that?

Maybe he was bored because he had to listen me practice my speech for 45 minutes ;-)

I have not been updating this blog for a while now, due to a lack of time while I'm finishing my PhD. Yet a lot has happened in the past weeks.

It has taken a while, but Nathan can now stand up, while holding onto something, like a table or a chair. He cannot pull himself up quite yet, but that should not be too long ;-)

While I have not seen it with my own eyes -- being in Seattle right now -- Nathan reportedly has gained the ability of crawling forward on hands and knees, instead of pushing himself backwards and turning around to get where he wants to be (read: where he can wreak most havoc). As a bonus, he can now also clap his hands, banging the flats against one another, instead of smashing his little fists together. Way to go son!

The trip started with a long ride on the train. We left Brussels around 22:15, to arrive in Zell am See around 12:15, the next day. Elias had been on a train before, but never for such a long time. We had booked sleeping places, 6 of them to be exact, which neatly fills up a single cabin. The first difficulty was getting all our bags inside. Nathan had his bugaboo with him, plus the accompanying bag, we had two Samsonite trolleys and a large backpack, and a small backpack with my powerbook and thesis (yes, I planned on doing some work).