Stairs

So I haven't posted in a while, and I realized it's because it came to the point when I had a lot of pictures to post and updates to give and I was too overwhelmed to sit down and do it all. And then I realized, I don't have to do it all at once if I don't have the time; I can do several posts! Duh. Anywho, if I do end up writing multiple posts on the same day, chances are you're reading them in reverse order from the top of the blog and the beginning of this post is redundant, but here we go anyway...

Steven turned 11 months on March 10th and celebrated by learning to climb the stairs. He hadn't shown much interest in them prior to this. A couple of times he had stood at the bottom and leaned on the first step looking up, and once I found him on the first step, but that's about it. On this day I was folding laundry in the family room and Mike was at the kitchen table writing birthday thank you notes while Steven was wandering around the house. Mike had an eye on him and, when he walked out of sight, an ear. He heard Steven tossing around some magazines in the living room (which we leave out on the coffee table for that purpose) and then things were quiet... too quiet. Mike went investigating and found him already on the third stair! He called me to come see and to bring my camera, and by the time I got in there Steven was already almost to the landing...

He seemed quite impressed with himself and how high he was--a new perspective on the house!

Perhaps you can see in the background of the above picture (on the sofa) that we had purchased a gate for the bottom of the stairs, and that it was still in its packaging. Well, out it came immediately. Steven was somewhat consternated by its appearance...

What is this new thing?

 

 

Can I go over it?

Can I go around it?

What have you done with my fun?

Since this day he has become a pro at climbing (fully supervised, of course) and has mostly learned to ignore the gate when it's up. He did shake it in frustration a bit, but it's sturdy!