Twelve!

Here it is, the very last monthly post for Luke...and four days late, to boot. He had his 1-year doctor's visit yesterday, which went startlingly well (but then, I'm always startled by doctors who have any level of common sense). He weighed in at 23 lbs and 12 oz, so he has tripled his birth weight and he's 31 inches tall, which means he's 10.5 inches taller than when he was born. It doesn't seem like a lot, it's less than a foot, but the difference is amazing.

He had to have his iron levels checked again because he was anemic last time and they're going (slowly) up: yay! Last Friday, he woke up with a fever and he was grouchy on Friday and Saturday and pulled on his ears a lot, so I suspected an ear infection. As it turns out, his ears are fine and all the discomfort was caused by the new TOOTH that came in yesterday morning. The first tooth must have lulled me into a false state of security because man, this second one was rough! And now, there's a third one lurking in his gums, probably waiting for an inopportune moment to poke on out.

Over the past two weeks, his walking skills have advanced by leaps and bounds. In fact, he's pretty much given up crawling now and is trying to master running (Gulp. Yikes.) His favorite game is putting things into boxes/buckets/anything with a hole and then pulling them back out. And of course, riling up the animals. And of course, climbing on Other Baby. And because he now knows how to walk, we've been trying to let him walk instead of riding the cart when we go to the store, which has been...trying. He seems to feel that he should be allowed to grab every. single. item off the shelves and when we don't let him indulge that particular desire, he lies down in the middle of the aisle and throws a kicking, screaming fit. Needless to say, we're trying to go at non-peak hours so as to expose as few people to the ridiculous tantrums as possible.

He had a great time at his birthday party, even though he wasn't feeling so great. A few of his baby friends came with their parents and his Paati (my mom) and Grandpa Ron (my stepdad) came from D.C. and his Papa (McMoose's dad) and KayKay (Papa's fiancee) came from Mississippi and brought his great-grandmother, Mimi with them. Luke loved being the center of attention, both during the party and for the rest of the weekend. I'm so grateful that our family members were able to travel to come to the party!

We didn't take any pictures of the party on our camera, so I won't be able to post any of those, but I'll post other pictures from this past month later this week.