It's official!

Elinor can walk now. She walked across about 7 feet of the living room with no help at all yesterday! She still doesn't do much, but there are a few moments each day that she will just trot a few feet. Really quite exciting and fun! What makes things all the more exciting and fun is that now I'm spending more time with her... Caitlin has started working so I get Elinor when I finish work two days a week and the two of us walk home.. And then on Sundays I have her to myself for about eight hours! This week it'll be even more as her mother is working today and every night for the next five days so I'll meet Elinor at work to walk home everyday!

The other exciting thing is that walk home. Yes, it gets a bit much as she fidgits and now weighs over 20 pounds, making it a bit too much of an exercise to carry her for 40 minutes across town, in fact I may switch from carrying her home to using the stroller. But regardless, I think that it is good to get her some outside time, around the people and animals and plants that surround us. Two days last week while walking over the pedestrian part of the Steel Bridge, there were a gaggle of Canadian Geese with a mob of little greenish-yellow goslings down below us on the riverbank! Maybe not as exciting as the Sea Lion that I saw frolicking in the river the week before, but still a fun thing to be able to show little Elinor! And then today, on our stroll back from Whole Foods, we were walking down Flanders, which is a nice little street with lots of flowering bushes, and she was having a grand time brushing her hands across the flowers as we rolled by. Since we aren't fortunate enough to have any sort of yard, I feel very good about any relaxing time that I can get her outside to experience the world.