Yesterday Elijah crawled for the first time (at least, as far as we know) and it was the perfect Father's Day present. He was on the floor of our living room with all four of his grandparents, his aunt (Sunita) and I watching. He badly wanted to play with a pop-up book that was just out of his reach. He got up on all fours as he has done for weeks now and reached out for the book. For the last few weeks whenever he would get to this point, he would look up at me and then retreat to a sitting position. But yesterday he moved forward. His little knees moved one in front of the other and his arms moved forward towards the book. His coordination was remarkably good for his first crawl (in my unbiased opinion) and he kept his balance fairly well.
We got him to repeat the feat a few times, but he could only go a few steps forward before his arms or legs got tired. I'm sure he will get stronger over the next few days opening a whole new world of exploration (and mischief) up to him. He has had his eyes set on a stack of magazines under the coffee table for some time now and has even managed to roll over to them once or twice and get a taste. He also is intent on tasting the leaves of a plant that sits just next to the couch in the living room.
He also gave us a huge laugh later in the day. We keep an eye on him when he's sleeping through our video monitor, and at one point he had disappeared from the screen. We didn't hear any crying or cooing so we assumed he was still asleep, but we had no idea where he was. Just then, we caught a glimpse of his head brush by the camera; then his fingers and hand reaching for it. Finally his head (which looked larger than life) came into view and filled the screen as stared right into the camera - apparently he had finally sit up in the crib and was examinging the little green light that had been hovering over his crib since we brought him home. Of course, later in the day I caught him trying to chew on the power cord for the camera.
