Movin and shakin

For what feels like months now, I've been fielding the questions of "is he crawling?" "is he standing?" "is he cruising?" and have had to respond with "no," or the qualified, "he's doing the army crawl, but he's not crawling with his belly off the floor."

Lately, he's been much more interested in standing.  He's been much more excited to drag over to me, climb over me, and have me pull him up to kneeling then standing.  Today he did this and kneeled on his own for the first time.

After the boys came home from school, I was talking with M, looked over, and saw that E was standing at his block table.  He'd pulled himself up!  He did it later at one of A's chairs.  So, he's standing!

We have a sunken family room off our kitchen with two steps.  When A was small, I went NUTS looking for safety gates that would work in this area, with absolutely no success (it's a very wide area, and gates for very wide areas need to be screwed in while we have brick on one side of the opening).

Today, E decided to try to climb these stairs.  He was able to get his knees on the first step, but didn't have enough room to push himself up to the second step. 

I am starting to seriously wonder if he's going to just skip over formal crawling and go right to walking.