Jacob is a stud

Fact of the day: Jacob is a stud. The other day, I watched him climb not one, not two, not three stairs but thirteen stairs. Thirteen. That’s our entire flight of stairs.

My first thought after watching him do it (I was behind him all the way, of course, figuratively and literally) was “Oh my goodness, this kid is a stud.” My second thought: “Good thing I’m not suspicious, living in a house with thirteen stairs.” My third thought: “Why in the world is a set of stairs called a flight?”
Anyway, let’s get back to the first thought. I’m a proud, doting mother, so I would have been thrilled if Jacob had even looked at the stairs with a gleam in his eye suggesting he might possibly want to climb the stairs. But the fact that he actually climbed them all by himself at six months still has me totally amazed.

Since Jacob is such a big guy—he’s consistently in the 90th percentile for his height and weight—and they say bigger babies are slower to do things like crawl and walk, I thought he might be a little slow in developing in those areas. Boy, was I wrong. This kid is a physical freak of nature. He started army crawling at four months and now at six months, we can’t keep him contained.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed him starting to pull up on anything and everything he could find. It wasn’t long before I found him sitting upright with one of his toys.

I figured it would still be a month or at least a few weeks before he would really get going. Wrong again. The same day he pulled up on his toy train, I left him in the living room for a moment. I had scanned the room first to make sure there was nothing he could get a hold of in the 30 seconds I was going to be gone. But when I opened the door, I saw this:

Instantly, I was a crazy melting pot of emotions. I was proud he had pulled himself up, scared to think about what could have happened had he toppled over onto the hard wood floor, and sad to see him looking so grown-up. (Fortunately, his diaper was peaking out of his onesie so I was able to keep it together on that last count.)

Now that he is mobile in nearly every sense of the word, life has gotten a whole lot crazier (and I’m burning a lot more calories). It’s hard to believe, but he’s conquered rolling over, crawling, and turning over in just six months. It looks like walking is the last frontier, at least until he turns sixteen. Of course, by then, a “melting pot of emotions” will be an understatement, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one who thinks he’s a stud.