Liam in Rotterdam - 3

These pictures were taken with our neighbour, Ton van Lith's, digital camera on our 1st wedding anniversary (11th May 2004), with Liam aged 11 months.

It's Liam playing with a "Daddy pen", which were/ are used to highlight the fractionally less turgid sentences in the journal articles Daddy has to read!

He had taken his first steps the month before. For a few days beforehand, he had been gearing up to it, dragging himself to his feet and practising finding his balance. Then, one morning at about 7am in the corridor of our flat, he looked over at both of us with a purposeful stare, as if to say, "Right you two, I've worked out how you two do it, are you ready for this?" and he stumbled forward a few steps, five or six or so...

It was - as it is for every parent - an amazing, life-affirming, easily-eclipsing-the-north-rim-of-the-Grand-Canyon sight, but I still felt a twinge of regret as I thought this was the end of the extremely cute 'crawling-only' phase...! Watching him bomb around on his hands and knees was always funny, and sweet to watch (see below). We don't spend long enough crawling, frankly.

Here is Liam, having mastered walking, outside our street with what was known as the 'loopwagen' (literally 'walking car', and pronounced 'lope-var-gkun' - something like that anyway). Oh, how the car drivers bombing down this shortcut to town loved to wait for him to cross the road...