Two good friends of mine just had their babies and I think back to what my first few days and weeks were like only 10 short months ago - seems like eons with as much that has happened in the meantime! Days were marked by 10-15 poopy diapers and non-stop feedings and now they are marked in crawls and pull ups and sounds that are meant to be words. Mason is a little boy on the road of discovery and adventure - literally and figuratively, as this also marks his first big trip. We have gone on a RV adventure from Portland, OR to the Redwoods of Northern California to the snows of Yosemite to the sunny Bay Area. An adventurer in the making!
This month has really been a world of possibility opening up for him since he is now mobile. He crawls around in search of what different rooms hold and what doors do and seeing what resides under rugs. He is learning the fine art of cause and effect: "If I crawl over the the DVDs and start pulling them off the shelf Mommy comes and picks me up and moves me across the room." He seems to have graduated from the inanimate toys such as wooden spoons and whisks and is on to bigger a better things - the springy door stoppers that shake and make noise, metal dresser handles that he can toggle, doors that creak when he opens and closes them, and Grandpa's Tag Heuer watch.
He makes vocalizations with enough inflections that we think he's "talking" although instead of words just short, but purposeful "ahs" and "ehs" and grunts come out in order to get people's attention and/or communicate with a toy. He occasionally gets into his "Frankensteinian" groans that I can't yet interpret, but I think is just entertaining for him in that it reverberates through his chest and he finds that amusing. His vocalizations are bordering on bossy, however, and I can tell that little personality is coming through as he realizes how he can affect a situation to his liking.
We have been traveling for the past two weeks and Mason has been a champion adventurer - visiting rivers and redwoods and ocean and glacial valleys with only a few moments of anguish as we put him in the carseat for another drive. I wouldn't usually recommend 4-6 hour drives day after day, but he seemed to appreciate the varied environments - well, at least he may appreciate them in 10+ years. We will have stories to tell - "when you were 10 months old you fell asleep as we hiked up to Vernal Falls...the generator didn't work after driving through 4 inches of snow in 30 degree weather...you touched a 1000 year old tree...you were carried across the Golden Gate bridge...you saw an octopus, penguin, and living roof" - and memories to recount through pictures and videos. And hopefully it will just whet his appetite for more travel.
Most exciting for his 10-month mark is that he gets to meet his entire McElwain side of the family - uncles, great aunt and uncles, great-great uncle (almost 96!), third cousin, and grandpa - for Easter Dinner, not that he will remember.
