Shall we walk?

At almost 16 mths, Keston is still not walking independently. He's been cruising everywhere for the past 6-7mths, but when we offer him our hands, he will sit down immediately. No matter, we thought. He'll walk when he wants to.

A couple of weeks back, we decided to be abit more pro-active in helping him start walking. This time we had him put on shoes and walk on carpeted flooring while holding our hands. Amazingly, he was thrilled and walked ALOT! We tried again on our marble floor and he refused to walk again. Then we brought him to the tennis court and again, he was pulling our hands and waddling up and down the court! Our precious is so particular about the ground he's on. If it's too hard, he doesn't want to walk!

Within 1-2 days, he progressed to walking while holding only 1 of our finger! He'd use one of his hands to balance himself...and the other hand to grasp one finger. He wasn't using the finger as a support but more as a confidence/comfort object. I kept joking about rolling up a piece of paper and letting him grab on to it while walking.

Side track abit... This idea came about cos I keep remembering this joke I heard in my uni days. A friend bought a roll of book wrapper (you know, the transparent plastic roll that we all used to wrap our textbooks in) and was riding in the bus on an aisle seat. Suddenly the bus jerked and the person standing in front of her grabbed on to the roll, thinking it's one of the support poles in the bus!!! Haha

So anyway, tonight after brushing Keston's teeth, I decided to let him grab the toothbrush... he held one end, while I held the head of the toothbrush. He took 1 step and I let go....he continued walking another 3-5 steps thinking he was still grabbing on to me!!! It was freaking hilarious! After he realised mummy wasn't beside him, he was stunned and promptly sat down.

So there you go, his first few unassisted steps! He was tricked, but still....