Look who's walking

I am really swamped at work (still!) and both Evelyn and I have been suffering from a cold for the last week. But I can't let another day go by without at least posting some videos of our girl walking! Actually, truly walking.

She started on her birthday, on the 23rd. Leading up to this day, she'd been standing on her own for longer periods, taken tiny steps here and there, and taken 2-3 clumsy steps between me and John. That's what she was doing here, until she decided it was time to venture out on her own path:



(You can ignore the high-pitched squealing from me :) I just couldn't contain my excitement.)

In just the span of a week, walking got easier and easier for her. Already, she's lost that look of astonished happiness at her new mode of locomotion. Here she is about 1 week after she started walking:



She was kind of waddling and swaying as she walked, with arms out in front of her, like a drunken Frankenstein. The drunken aspect of her walking is mostly gone now, and she is managing to pivot and side-step in addition to just going forward. In fact, lately she's been pivoting and pacing back and forth, sometimes going in a small tight circle. This past weekend, she was doing that around a prone John -- she was just pacing around him and cracking up every time she caught sight of him lying face down on the rug.

Now, almost 2 weeks after she started, she's already begun to prefer walking to crawling. At first, she walked til she fell, then crawled from there. Now, she tends to get back up after falling and continues on her way on foot. And she is getting plenty of bumps and scrapes along the way (a couple of pretty nasty ones too, including a spectacular face plant on her chin which I thankfully did not personally witness).