Just Crawling

Ben has been trying his hardest to crawl for the past two weeks.  He has been going one "step" with each arm and each knee, then collapse and roll around.  He has been getting where he wants to go using this method, followed by pushing up to sitting, then going back down to all fours and starting over, so he kind of sidewinds across the room.  If he did act like he was really going to take off, Natalie was almost always standing by to lend a hand by (1) swiping the toy that was tempting him across the room, (2) knocking him over, or (3) creating some kind of diversion by running by yelling "I'm a crazy lady" or diving off a piece of furniture.  Even though he's been pretty mobile, I would by no means have said he was officially crawling.

Then, while we were making dinner, this happened...

I'm so proud of him.  He is going to be thrilled to finally be able to keep up with the big kids once he gets past those awkward first crawls and coordinates a little better (and stops that weird bear crawl thing he's doing).  All day today whenever I've looked at him I've been sort of blown away by how all of a sudden he seems so big and like he's really not a "little" baby anymore.  Where did the last 7 months go?