Friday, July 6, 2012

Crawl and Fall

In the realm of baby milestones, the past twenty-four hours has been a busy one.  While my daughter can crawl, she has done so with agonizingly slow forward-motion.  She moves all around, but she hadn't figured out the hand, knee, other hand, other knee process of forward propulsion with deliberate certainty until yesterday.

I noticed if there was something new, something exciting, something maybe involving a talking Elmo across the way, she became motivated to get over and check it out.  My son brings things over to her regularly.  He's sometimes interested in showing them to her, other times he just likes to be where the action is.  So she commonly has things close at hand.  I've pulled everything away from her in the past, but this last week of babyhood has completed more circuits and now she gets it.

On the boy front, my son has never climbed out of his crib before today.   We've heard all sorts of stories from parents about when and how their children climbed out.  I've been thankful that his crib is either too deep, too slippery or he's just not had desire enough to try and climb out.  The only time I've ever seen him try is when he had a toy in the mornings to bridge him until it was time to get up.

Uncomfortable as it might be to stand on that toy, he would do so in order to gain another inch or two towards the rail.  This morning, just after my husband left I went to the basement to get some work done and I heard a loud thump-a-bump.  This was followed by a startled, but not injured cry.  As I headed upstairs I heard him crying in the hallway and when I got upstairs he was trying to explain to me what had happened via baby babble.

I picked him up and he stopped crying.  We called daddy to let him know he had missed the fun.  My husband speculated it was leverage from the truck he was playing with, and it was.  Truck and two blankets piled on top for maximum height.  I changed him, put him back in the crib and replaced his current toys with thinner toys.

Baby mobility has been raised to another level at the house now.  It's easy to complain and say you're tired and how exhausting babies are, but it's worse to think for one moment that your child wouldn't be trying to learn new things, become more mobile, get into more trouble even.  So we smile, hope nap time will come soon, and carry on.

The Big Boy Update:  In addition to getting out of the crib, his vocabulary continues to grow quickly.  Yesterday I was surprised how many body parts and items of clothing he knew from playing with the Mister Potato Head parts.  He knew shoes and hats, arms and hands, eyes, noses, mouths and teeth.  But he didn't know what one item was.  I took it and said "mustache" and showed him where it went on my face.  He spent the next several minutes trying to say the word and alternating putting it on my face and his face.  When daddy came home later, he showed him too.  The real test will be when we see someone with a mustache in the future and he recognizes it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Aside from solving the crawling problem, she's been doing well.  So well, that we take her into restaurants and sit her in a high chair now.  She loves to sit up, bang on the table and watch everything happening.  She far prefers that to sitting in the car seat in a chair the whole meal.  So it's new car seat time.  We're not sure if we're upgrading him and passing down to her, or getting one similar to his convertible that she can use.  I see shopping in our new future.  I am betting my husband has a coupon.

Running Update:  Pushing through the park.  There's a run/bike path my husband and I like to go around in the large, natural park across the street.  I have been in there with the double stroller before, casually walking with a friend, and my running partner said she'd be up for doing a brisk walk with the kids some day so I thought I'd try it out.  Bad decision.  The 5.6 mile walk was tough on two children who didn't want to spend an hour-and-a-half in their stroller in the middle of the hot summer.  I brought food and beverages for them but that won't fix a messy diaper in the case of my daughter and they didn't enjoy miles of rocky, bumpy stroller time in the muggy heat.  From a workout perspective, pushing a double stroller up a rocky incline was great, if slow.  In order to make it home faster I ended up running some of the more groomed, downhill areas.  Everyone was happy when we got back to the house.

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