The first two images in the post below are our little guy at two months. The rest are him in all his ten-month-old glory.

When you’re the firstborn, you get your three month, six month, nine month …. and every milestone in between, tirelessly documented by parents frothing with pride and joy. And rightly so. Kids are amazing miracles. When I’m editing my photos so that the sheer magnitude of them won’t take down our desktop computer, it kills me to delete those blurry shots or ones where every child but one is blinking – and that one child is in the middle of the zombie faces beaming, but there is no way to crop out everyone else so that it looks normal.

Problems of a perfectionist? Perhaps.In the name of doing things partway rather than not at all, I wanted to give a nod to our youngest, who is not at any official milestone right now (except that everything a baby does in its first two years is amazing).

He is doing new and interesting things every day. He whistles, blows raspberries, cruises along the furniture, and gives us his hammy smile with one and a half teeth showing. All the things millions of babies have done before him (except maybe the whistling? I feel like that might be unique to him), but that are newly wonderful to us because we’re his family.

Ten months might be my favorite baby stage. They have personalities, and I prefer their grunting and babbling to the attitude that little talkers can dish.

Best of all, they are so at ease in their bodies. They smoothly roll from sitting to crawling position, onto their knees to examine something, then they are pulling up to stand. They know what their bodies are capable of. They know how to hug. How to pick things up and put them somewhere else. All this stuff we do that we take for granted and aren’t super grateful to our bodies for, ten month old babies do with a sense of awe that is boss. And then they look at you with a huge grin, or they arch their backs and flop backward to tell you how they really feel. I just love it.