Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows we have an 8 1/2-month-old baby girl, Charis. Well, recently she entered a whole new era of baby-dom–crawling. She started crawling about 2 weeks ago, and late last week started to venture from beyond the center of the living room. Now she can make it to the bathroom in 30 seconds flat. The look on her face when she enters a new room on her own is priceless. To look at her, you would think she was a 6-year-old at Disney World for the first time.

Charis came to us nearly 4 years after our youngest child, so it has been a while since we did the “baby thing.” We also did the baby thing with the first 3 in 3 years, which means we never really had any “big kid toys” around to have to deal with like we do now. You know what I mean–Leggos and every other kind of toy with little pieces that an infant could easily chew on and eventually choke on. So the doors to the older kids’ rooms are regularly closed. We are vigilantly watching and listening to make sure she doesn’t go somewhere that could lead to trouble.

Did I mention, we’re old (at least I am). This means we get even more tired than we did chasing after the first three (and I never thought then that this could be possible 😉 The up side of all this is that this time around we have 3 very young people to help with the chasing.

The bottom line is that we wouldn’t trade all the chasing after Charis we have to do and the monitoring of her young ‘chasers” for anything in the world. (We might be willing to part with some of the Leggos and little toy pieces, though.)