Life after crawling

Eli has definitely found his stride in the crawling world, and it has changed quite a few things. First of all, I feel like Wes and I are clean people and that we take care of keeping our house picked up and things like that most of the time. Now I feel like our house is always dirty! I've never paid as much attention to the floor as I do now! I'll find a little piece of string here, a little piece of dog food there and I'm like, "oh my gosh! Eli could put that in his mouth!"

Secondly, Eli loves exploring our house, which I love too, because hello, it's also his house. But I have never noticed so many hazards in our house before! I mean, there are sharp corners on things I haven't even thought of until he crawls up to it and I see it. Thankfully he hasn't been injured on anything, and it's not like they are spikes sticking off of things, but you know, something that doesn't feel that sharp to me leg is still sharp to his forehead!

Also, I do everything much faster or stick him in his bouncy thing if I need to leave the room for more than a minute. The other day I went from the living room where Eli was to the kitchen (which are CONNECTED and I can clearly see into the living room from the kitchen) to wash my hands. As I'm washing them, I hear this weird noise, so I turn around and look and Eli has pulled DVDs out of the DRAWER by the TV! What?!

He's also started to do this squinty thing coupled with a big huge smile! haha... I have to get a picture of it because it is one of the cutest things I've ever seen!

And, Eli's always been a big talker but now he's learned to scream! I'm sure this isn't something that I will think is super cute and funny if we are in a restaurant, but every once in awhile he'll let out this really high pitched scream! as shown below.
Well... I do have a new thing I've faced several times with people that baffles me. Wes and I want more than one child and we'd actually like three or four and figure, since we've already started this process, why not just keep going? My brother and I are 8 months apart and my sister and I are 6 years apart, so I don't know what it's like to have someone just a couple of years younger than me but that's what we want for Eli. We're going to start trying to have another baby sometime this Spring. We've thought a lot about it, looked at a lot of different pros and cons, but ultimately we decided that this is what we are doing. When I tell people this, reviews are mixed. Most people are like, "that's great! every family is different, so doing what works for you is great" but some people are like "ooooo.... I don't know about that. Having them so close together {Eli will be 2 when the baby is born if all goes as planned} is not that great." and yadda yadda yadda they proceed to list their reasons why they didn't want to do that for their family. Once again, these have been learning moments for me of how I need to really stop and think about whether or not someone just asked my advice for something, OR if they were telling me what they are doing just to let me know. My standard answer, whether it's to family members, friends, or strangers has just been a polite, "That's the decision we have made and we're the ones who will live with it."

Who knew this whole having a child thing would teach me so many lessons that have nothing to do with the actual child...