Babies!

As i've mentioned before, we're expecting our second at the end of March. I have two other friends in Chicago that are also pregnant and due just a few weeks before and after me. We also live in roughly the same neighborhood and i'm very much looking forward to having other new moms around while i'm off on maternity leave. I saw both of them this weekend and we did some initial talking about baby showers i'll be helping plan for each of them. The baby is moving around all over the place now and this Thursday we have the 20-week anatomical ultrasound, although the primary purpose of the ultrasound is to make sure that things are progressing anatomically correctly, we hopefully get to find out the sex of this little one. I had a dream last night that we were at the ultrasound and it was a boy but as the stats predict, it feels like a toss-up to me.

Henry and i made our first outing to the library on Saturday. We went to pick out some new books for him and then headed to the book store for story hour. Unfortunately they don't have story hour at the library on weekends, thus the two-stop outing. Henry was so cute sitting on the little bench looking at the book (and really everything else all around) and then had a great time wandering around the store and looking at the truck/tractor/airplane books (and one "my secret diary book all done up in pinks and purples with included stamps-- he was transfixed by that one.)

We went out for walks a couple times today and he's getting pretty quick walking on the sidewalk in front of our house. Everytime we come home now he wants to walk outside rather than go inside. Once i coax him to our steps he'll hold my hand while he walks up a few and then insists on holding onto the handrail while he does the rest. This was something the therapist identified as a weakness last week so we're glad to see some progress.

We also saw "progress" in going down the stairs but that wasn't quite as pretty. For the past few weeks if Henry is near the back of the hours and sees or hears me going down the steps into the basement he'll wait at the top of the basement stairs and occasionally yell down to me until i come back up. Tonight i ran down to take some of his outgrown clothes to their respective boxes, and before i got back to the stairs i heard him crying. He had plenty of crying jags/tantrums this weekend so i figured he was just upset i wasn't back up there. Once i rounded the landing though i saw that he had taken one step down and he was terrified. He was basically stuck and afraid. He cried for a little while even after i picked him up, and for the rest of the night would say "no, no, no" when he looked at the basement stairs. At least he tried them, but now we have to close the basement door when we go down there and continue to work on his descending skills.