Just Another Ordinary Miracle: Ohio Visit Pic-fest

I guess I gave away all the news in the last post. Zain is crawling very well now. Not super-fast yet, which is good (for us), but he really gets around. He loves crawling to various upright objects and then pulling himself to a stand, and standing there squealing for awhile. And, as I mentioned, thankfully he learned how to sit from a stand instead of falling and bonking his head (Shif's "sitting boot camp" helped).

His other hobby right now is music. He has always been a singer. Now he's adding instruments. He likes to knock toys together to make sounds. The last couple days on the change table, he's been rubbing the tin of zinc butt cream along the wall to make new sounds. He also likes to sing while he has a toy in his mouth and make different sounds with it. He has one hollow block that is a favorite for this - it must have good acoustics. Sometimes he'll also smack the toy with his hand for a little rhythm. I think we've mentioned his head shake before? For the last month or two, he's been shaking his head (the "no" shake). He used to do it at people, seemingly trying to get them to shake back. And he'd also shake at Binda and at characters in books. Now it seems the shake is also some kind of dance move. It happens frequently when music comes on. And every now and then, the rest of the body gets in on the action, too; but he's generally more of a singer than a dancer.

We had a great two-week vacation in Ohio. Got to see lots of family members, highlighted by Aunt Mary and Uncle Ryan's wedding. Zain looked very dapper, dressed up with his posse of cousins. Here are several gajillion pictures from our visit (And we've registered the complaints from Zain Nation about our blog slacking. It's been a hectic recently. We promise more frequent updates now!).