We are at a cusp of identity with J – he has been talking for about 6 months, maybe a little longer. Until very recently, if you asked him, “Are you a big boy?”, he would reply “I’m a baby!”. But just yesterday, he has started to deny the title “Baby”, and is claiming “Big Boy” status. This change may be related to our recent progress on the potty-training front (Yay!), and he’s very excited about that (finally).
He’s changed a lot in the last couple months, gaining a more complex vocabulary, and mastering his body and balance better and better. His infantile roundness is giving way to the more elongated habitus of a boy.  His latest joy is getting airborne – all of about 2 inches off the ground, no jump shots yet for this kid – but he takes every opportunity to show off how he can jump.  This morning, he jumped over a threshold in the bathroom door – it took all the preparation of at long-jumper in the Olympics.  So, this reminded me of how much a baby he was when he first arrived in our home, still on all fours, and I and my husband were trying to remember when he actually walked…it took awhile, but I finally found the video that documented that moment, and was surprised to see that the date-stamp on the file was 2/11/10 – only 3 weeks after our arrival home!!  It seemed to us in retrospect that it was months of his crawling before he became a biped.  Of course, the moment of first walking was followed by several months of preferring crawling to walking, so, it probably was around April 2010 that he became more upright than horizontal.  Anyway, here’s the video-documentation of that momentous and joyous evening!!  The funniest thing, I think, is that each time he attempts to walk, he has to yell/sing at the top of his lungs – it’s like his voice is keeping him up!!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuNOhrIUcx0&w=560&h=349]