Merry Christmas from Liam

(this post was written 12/23 but for some reason didnt post, so I'm posting it now).

I would have loved to do a professional photo shoot to capture Liam at this age. He is so completely darling. He lavishes everyone with these wonderful high-watt baby smiles. He crawls, he pulls up. He is curious and adventurous and sweet.

But we didn't have the extra cash to splurge on a photo shoot, though I hope to do pictures for his one year birthday if we can find a photographer with reasonable rates whose style we like.

So instead here are the fruits of several different efforts over a couple of days. It was more complicated than I thought. I had to wait for a day that was bright and sunny because the flash

He seems to learn new things daily. We've been working on self feeding since he was about 8 months old. He seemed to take a long time to figure out the pincher grip. But in the last week it has taken off like wildfire. Now at breakfast he likes to hold the spoon and try to feed himself. Left to his own devices, he sort of taps the spoon on top of the oatmeal and puts it into his mouth. With some copiloting from me, he can get food on the spoon and into his mouth. Though sometimes halfway to his mouth he gets so excited about it all that he flaps his arms a bit and the oatmeal flies all over the place.

Speaking of flapping his arms, the first night at my parents house for Christmas he learned how to wave buh-bye. It isn't super precise looking, but if you wave at him (and he's in a good mood) he'll flap his hand back at you. If he flaps his hand at you and you wave back then he beams a giant smile, amused that he can get adults to do something.

At the visit to my parents we also discovered he knows how to climb up stairs. We don't have stairs at home so we have no idea how long he has possessed this skill, but we were all sitting downstairs with the toy box playing and then he took off towards the stairs. I followed him, and when he got there almost without hesitation he started clambering up. Of course, he has so idea how to go down. His idea of going down is to turn around and try to crawl straight down.

Since we've gotten to Grandma and Pop McDonnell's house, he has really stepped up his mastery of self feeding. Now at lunch I just put the hunks of food on his tray and he picks it up and gobbles it down (today was veggie chili, so pieces of cauliflower, corn, potato, carrot and beans). He likes to go up the stairs at this house, and each stair has a different snowman sitting on it. All sorts of exciting things for little hands to play with.