Time to start baby-proofing--for real!

Kale crawled the other day!

Of course, he won't do it anymore now that I know he can and want him, too. But at least I know that he can. Also, he's been doing everything he can to stand up on his own and with some help initiating it, he'll pull up on the chair and couch. It's so friggin' funny to watch him, too. As soon as he's pulled himself up, he holds on with one hand and then starts to laugh or has this big goofy grin on his face. Sometimes he falls, but he'll pull himself back up again. Sometimes he'll just turn himself around and then lean on whatever it is he pulled himself up on--but he'll still be standing. He's just so damn cute.

You may be asking yourself why is this such a big deal to us. I mean, aside from the fact that it's exciting for any parent to watch this happen with their baby. Well, visually impaired babies tend to be delayed when it comes to things like crawling and walking. I have worked and worked with Kale to do these things and finally just kind of stopped pushing it so much. I figured he'll do it when he's ready. And sure enough--he proved he knew what to do all along! And he's figuring out the whole standing thing on his own--because he wants to. Not because I'm drilling it in his head every minute of the every day.

Now if only I could get him off the bottle and on to a sippy cup. And drinking milk. And eating something other than baby food...(And believe me, I've tried every trick).

All I know is help from a visual impairment teacher cannot come quick enough. We have a staffing meeting next week with a bunch of people and a VI teacher and I'm crossing my fingers we won't have to wait much longer after that to get the ball rolling. Kale will be thirteen months old tomorrow--I wish we'd had all of this taken care of at least six months ago. Maybe some of these road bumps we're hitting could have been avoided. It's not their fault though. Because there was the question regarding whether he had hearing loss or not, we had to wait until all of that was taken care of. We didn't finally get our answer until the end of March. And I think it was April or May before I ever was able to get back in touch with the people I needed to regarding this situation. And then it was June and VI teachers were out for the summer. Luckily, we were able to get back on track once school started back up and it's just been a meeting here, a meeting there. And finally this meeting next week.

Cross your fingers that it won't be much longer!