Bonks!

Claire is 8.5 months old right now and her favorite thing to do is to pull herself up on everything.  She started this new phase the week we got back from Utah.  I think she got some inspiration to move around a bit more (okay, A LOT more) from her cousins.  Of course, the law of gravity unfortunately applies to my sweet baby:  what goes up, must come down.  Claire has been falling and bonking her head as she tries to climb up on everything in reach.  I tried to take some pictures of her forehead with multiple bruises, hopefully you can see some in the picture below.

 I couldn't get a picture with her eyes open, the flash was too much.

Here are a few pictures of Claire standing by/on things she has pulled herself up on.  She also loves to use our pant legs, tv stand, toilet, and couch as tools to get to a standing position.

Claire has morphed her worm crawl into a true crawl yesterday and today.  She goes back and forth using her worm crawl and the true crawl while trying to get to something.   I believe the true crawl will win in the end because she is already much faster at it...so scary for me!

Lastly, Claire has found the stairs in our apartment.  There are about 18 stairs and they are very steep with a linoleum floor at the bottom.  She hasn't gone down them yet, but she sure tries.  I am so worried she will get over to them before I catch her and she will tumble to the bottom, resulting in serious injury.  I guess I will have to get a gate soon, though I don't really want to.  Jacob and I have tried showing her to turn around and to climb down the stairs, but she gets upset and is only interested in going down face forward.  Plus, if she happened to slip while climbing down...it is still a long way down to the bottom of the stairs.

And just a cute picture of Claire after a hard mornings work getting
into everything her mom doesn't want her to!