Don’t worry, I can get down the stairs myself.

ME: Hey Zachary, what is the one gift you want more than anything this year?

ZACHARY: A staircase for our apartment!!!

ME: You do understand that we live in an apartment?

Zachary loves going up and down the stairs and I absolutely love watching him do so especially going down the stairs. We spent this past weekend at Zachary’s grandparents’ house and Zachary may have gone up and down the stairs a hundred times. He has gotten quite good at going up and down and what I find especially amazing is how fast he can get down the stairs. While getting up the stairs for a midget can be a challenge, getting down the stairs is a much more difficult task. Zachary has been able to get up the stairs since before he was one year but getting down always presented a problem. Zachary would try to walk down the stairs like any normal sized adult which, if we let him, would have resulted in quite a bad tumble.  I kept trying to teach Zachary that he had to go down on his butt or crawl down backwards but it took a while for the lesson to stick. He would always go to the edge of the stairs and lean over in an effort to give me an early heart attack. We finally had a break through when we were in San Diego this past October. Zachary never adjusted to the time difference and would wake up bright eyed at 4AM ready to play. I would take him down to the front of our friend’s building where there was a big staircase – big for Zachary that is. For maybe an hour  each morning before sunrise Zachary would practice going up and down the stairs. He had quite a good time and baffled the one guy who left for work really early who was wondering what the heck I was doing with my baby at 4:30AM. Every time Zachary approached the stairs I would emphasize that he had to get down and he would lower himself and crawl down the stairs backwards. He would sometimes lower himself like 10 feet early and start crawling backwards in preparation for the stairs. At his grandparents this past weekend, Zachary was almost flying/gliding down the stairs to everyone’s amazement. He now gets down the stairs much faster than he gets up the stairs. Zachary still starts getting ready to go down the stairs way to early but I am not planning on correcting him on that as I prefer the cautious approach.