"Now, if we could get him to chew gum at the same time..."

It’s no secret that Sutton and I are both fairly anxious for our son to start walking – although our motivations are slightly different. Sutton’s afraid, like any working mom or dad, that he won’t be here to see it, so he practices walking with him every night and on the weekends in the hopes that he’ll get to witness those first few elusive steps. In fact, he’s instructed me to push Suttie down every time he tries to stand up during the day. My motivations are slightly less honorable. Do I want him reach important milestones? Sure. But what I really want is to not have to shop in the men’s big and tall section this time next year. There’s a rumor afloat that, when children start to walk, they shed some of those extra baby pounds. We’re looking to lose about twelve.

In all seriousness, it is hard to buy clothes for a child that has consistently reached the 98th percentile in height and the 99th percentile in weight. He just turned one and is currently rocking a size 3T (requiring the pants to be hemmed up about a foot). So, we’ve been working on the walking thing as the only alternative to making his clothes, and, if they can’t be put together with a hot-glue gun, then it ain’t happening. Now, we’ve gotten lots of advice on the subject (some solicited, some not), and so far, nothing has worked. We tried the most obvious choice first – bribing him with food. First, we get him to stand up using one of his play tables, and then one of us holds out a cracker or cookie just in front of him and high enough that he can’t reach it sitting down. We wait with bated breath as he rises onto his toes and shifts his weight…and that’s when he starts to scream. As he stands there, wailing for whatever Gerber bait we have, his feet remain cemented to the floor. We’ve tried this several times, all of which end with zero steps taken and Suttie eating the cookie.

The next trick was to position ourselves so close to each other that he wouldn’t have room to go down into a crawling stance. So, he’d be forced to walk, right? Wrong. Instead of walking from his dad into my waiting arms, he just fell forward, straight into my lap, since the distance was short enough that he could fall and still reach me. The kid’s vertically impaired, but he ain’t no dummy.

We’ve worked on the walking thing every day for at least a month, and a few days ago, I was certain that I’d be carrying him into kindergarten. But yesterday, the unexpected happened. We were in the playroom – Suttie was moving from toy to toy and I was on the elliptical, trying to set a good fitness example for him because, at the rate we’re going, he’ll need it. He pulled up at his activity table, something he's done a million times at least, and then he noticed a Mother Goose book that he wanted, laying a foot or so in front of him. So, he let go of the table, took a single step, realized what he was doing, and quickly plopped down onto his butt.

Here I was, on the elliptical, not in front of him coaxing him along or dangling treats. There he was, not in his Stride Rite shoes, which I thought were crucial to moving those feet, but in a one-piece sleeper with legs that were too long and footies that didn’t quite fit – taking his very first step. I got him to do it once more immediately after that, but not since. And while he may be Easter egg hunting on all fours this year, I have a renewed sense of hope that, by the end of the summer, he’ll be running away from me in public.