It's hard to believe in less than a month Riley will be a year old. Holy cow, where does the time go? Seems like we just brought him home from the hospital yesterday...but on the other hand, it feels like he's been with us forever.

As we enter this final month of age "zero," we are all getting very excited about all the new experiences Riley will soon have: turning the car seat around so he faces forward, drinking milk, eating ice cream and most importantly, destroying that first birthday cake!

Riley is still "Army Crawling" like a champ. He's also pulling up on everything and anything and cruising around furniture and actual people. Last week he was standing up, holding onto the coffee table...when he looked over at Kim, reached his hand out, grabbed Kim's hand and took about three steps towards her and fell into her arms. It was awesome! He'll be walking in no time...and we hear that's when the "real trouble" starts!

Riley is saying a few words, but mostly babbles at this point. He says "Dada" a lot, then points at Bill. He also says, "Mama" and "Baba" and "At." We're trying to teach him to put any consonant in front of "at" so he'll end up saying, "bat" or "cat." You can see that he WANTS to say more! And now when he wants something, he has learned to point at what he wants! He points at EVERYTHING!

We are working on trying to get rid of or moving the dangerous furniture in the house. We just got rid of our coffee table that he has been chewing on. Unfortunately we've found him with brown stain on his lips and we fear that he may get splinters from the table...so we sold it. And we're going to mount our TV above the fireplace and hide the VCR, XBox and DVR in a child-proofed cabinet! Now we are in discussions about getting rid of our dining room altogether, so that Riley will have more room to run and for all his toys he is collecting.

He is wearing size 18 - 24 month clothing now and is almost outgrowing them. He is a big boy and freakishly strong. Once he grabs that spoon you're feeding him with, it's over. He'll get a hold of that and won't let go! It almost takes two people to pry it out of his hands!

October 1st will be here before we know it and our infant will soon be a toddler. We feel old.