It started on her birthday. We both took a nap after we
arrived home from church. When I woke up a few hours later, I opened the door
to her room to get her up…and stopped short. I asked Ed if he had been in her
room, but he shook his head no and asked why. I pointed. He came to see…and
stopped short. She was sitting up in her crib, looking at us and probably
wondering what all the fuss was about.
Over the next week, we found her this way many times –
happily sitting up in her bed and playing with her stuffed animals. Since she
never set herself up anywhere else, we figured she was somehow using the rails
to pull herself up. It wasn’t until Saturday morning when I got her up that I
saw her do it – she simply got up on her hands and knees, swung her feet under
her and sat up. For some reason it just hadn’t dawned on her that she could do
this outside her crib. At least until the next morning…
She’s been getting up and her hands and knees, rocking
herself back and forth for a week or two now. I haven’t thought much about it
for she gets around quite well rolling, wiggling and using her arms to maneuver
her body in the direction she wants to roll. This form of transportation is
awkward only in doorways (especially in our little duplex where four doorways
meet in one small area). But that’s okay because then I rarely find her in a
different room than the one I left her in. On Sunday morning, she was up on her
hands and knees, happily rocking back and forth. I got down next to her and showed
her how to crawl a few feet forward. What did she do? Crawled a few feet
forward. Before the day was over, she was crawling just about anywhere she
pleased and then sitting down to enjoy whatever it was she was after.
So now we do find her in a different room from the one in
which we left her. And I have had to put a few things away (mostly because I’m
tired of picking them up every day – she does tend to leave a disaster in her
wake as she moves from one place to the next). And it’s kind of funny to find
she has followed you whenever you are. But the crawling itself isn’t any huge
deal. The big change this has brought about is that her peripheral vision is
about a foot further up than it once was. So, she can now see books on shelves,
and DVDs left on the television stand, and electric outlets (which are already
child proof – or adult proof as you have to be Super Man to plug something into
them), and a myriad of other things she never before knew existed. She’s also
reaching to hold onto things and so pull herself up to see other things. She
just doesn’t trust her own balance enough to pick both hands up off the floor.
But once she does that…well, it’s a good thing we have doors to shut.
Yes, our little girl is growing up. Aside from becoming extremely
mobile, she is showing more and more of her feminine side. She hugs and kisses
just about everything. The other day she was playing with her new Little People
barnyard full of animals, picking up each animal and giving it a hug. And I
have grown adventurous in trying to put her hair up in pigtails. It keeps it
out of her face, but please excuse me if they’re not always even. I’m not very
good at styling hair anyway – a moving target hardly helps!
Crawling away…
Just because we’re cute!
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