Last Tuesday, May 3rd, Oliver finally took his first steps.

You might be wondering why it took me so long to get a blog post up about this, and that would be a good question. The thing is, he has just been so reluctant to do it on a regular basis! I was hoping to get a good video, and I’m still waiting!

We were so sure he was going to walk shortly after his birthday. He was doing everything but walking. He really seemed like he was ready. But day after day, he just didn’t quite get there, despite all of our encouraging. Of course, when he finally did walk, I was in Detroit for work. Sara called to tell me he finally took a few steps, and I could almost hear strains of Cats in the Cradle playing in the background. I felt pretty terrible about missing it. But he only took two steps the first day, and really wasn’t in a hurry to repeat it.

It was so different than Evie. It’s kind of funny because, personality-wise, Evie is a pretty cautious person and Oliver seems to be more of a risk taker. A bit more rambunctious, perhaps. So you would expect that he would be the one trying to let go and do it. But, in fact, it was kind of the opposite. When Evie figured out how to walk, she was all about it. She was pretty much done with crawling at that point, it was all walking from that point on. Oliver’s preferred method of locomotion is still crawling. He’ll walk from one thing to another now and again, but if you try to get him to walk, he just drops down to his hands and knees right away. With Evie it was more like she felt pride in mastering the challenge, but to Oliver it’s all about the practicality of getting to where he wants to go, and crawling is much more efficient at this point.

Still, he’s getting there, and he’s walking more and more. I think the most I’ve seen so far is eleven steps, but he’s more comfortable in the seven or so step range. I try to practice with him by holding his hands and letting him walk, but he rarely wants to go in the direction I want him to go in. Again, for him it’s all about getting where he wants to go. He’s not content to march up and down the hall for practice, he wants to lead you over to something he wants to get at.

Obviously the first birthday was a big, recent milestone, but somehow walking seems so much more official. He’s really old enough to walk? Where does the time go?