There’s just something about Dora the Explorer. Baby Gabe doesn’t watch any other cartoon. We bought a DVD of Dora and keep the box up on our entertainment center. So now he just walks up and grabs the box whenever he wants to watch it. Sometimes, if he dropped it somewhere and we didn’t put it back yet, he points at the DVD remote and says “DO, DO.” The funniest part of all this is that he’s learned all the songs. In every episode, Dora and Boots have to stop Swiper the Fox from stealing something. Whenever they see him, the yell out, “Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping!” Swiper responds by snapping his fingers and saying, “Oh, man…” Baby Gabe picked up on that. You can hear it in the opening song. Whenever Dora and Boots finish saying “Swiper, no swiping,” Baby Gabe chimes in, “Oh, meh.”
We sometimes long for the days when Baby Gabe would just open his mouth and happily ingest anything we put in front of him. Feeding him now is a much more interactive adventure, particularly early in the dining process. He makes his preferences known, as you can see, and eats up his favorites first. The “favorites” change depending on the day. He loved the tomato basil tart the day before.
He just took his first steps two days ago. Now he’s running around everywhere. He hasn’t quite gotten the concept of stopping yet. He just runs into things and bounces off.
Despite the sleep troubles Baby Gabe has had, it’s impossible to feel victimized when he wakes up like this from naps. It just goes to show what a blessing he really is.
After a week, Gabriel has gone from a tentative, uncoordinated crawl (same hand and knee forward) to the sure, coordinated crawl. He’s even maneuvering around blockades we put up to keep him from getting to potted plants, surge protectors, etc. That whole “out of sight, out of mind” theory? Doesn’t work. He knows what’s behind the pillow and just knocks it down to get to those power cords.
He’s actually been crawling for a few days now, but whenever we tried taking a video, he would get distracted by the camera. So then we decided to try having him crawl towards the camera since he likes it so much. He looks like a lion stalking his prey with his quiet, deliberate steps.