Moving pictures

Emmett seems to be making big steps this week. In fact, I think that he was highly motivated by Augie's visit last week where Augie got in Emmett's jumping toy and actually jumped and Augie was sitting up unassisted. Well, Emmett put on his go-get-em hat and in the past week has achieved these two goals. Emmett is definitely sitting up well, with me able to actually leave him in a sitting position in a room where he is completely unsupported and go into other rooms to take care of tasks. Pretty nice. This is the calm before the crawling around storm, I think.

I took a video of Emmett jumping in his toy---I haven't mentioned it here before, but a couple of weeks ago we got our second plastic baby entertainer second-hand off of craigslist...this one allowing the child to jump up and down (it is called the jumperoo for those curious). Emmett is starting to like it much more now that he understands how to jump, as seen in the (somewhat boring) video:



A couple of things about the video. First, the elephant calls seem to motivate the jumping. I don't know if this is coincidence or not. Second: he jumped out of one sock. Third: Yes, his father makes him wear two different socks at times because he keeps losing one of a pair and I don't think want to waste two good socks. Fourth: he has a sort of one-footed jump approach that has me convinced that he is going to be the front man for Jethro Tull when Ian Anderson moves on to other things...better buy the flute now.

Emmett has been trained, or has trained me, to put my fingers in front of him so that he can grab them to pull himself up to the sitting position. Unfortunately, I showed him that if he stayed connected he could pull himself up fully. It is getting harder to get him to stay in the seated position as he always wants to have me help him pull himself up to the fully standing position. Andrea took a video of me putting my fingers in front of him, him grabbing them and then doing most of the work to pull himself up to seated. He does some work to get up to standing, but I definitely have to help him. The sound of the grunt at the end of the herculean effort, however, would lead the casual observer to believe he has done all of the work.


We spent the last two days interviewing prospective nannies for the 6 weeks that I will be teaching. I think that the stress of making sure that we find a good nanny is one of the hardest things we have gone through with Emmett. Andrea would probably say it was the actual birth.