According to my mother I was standing at 7 months. I skipped crawling and went straight to walking, though I did have to use things to hold myself up but still why crawl when you can walk? We wondered if the little one would take after us and after months of her wanting to grow up before her time, we decided that it was a sure thing that she will be walking quite quickly. Having experienced how well she can climb using our bodies as her very own climbing wall and finding out how strong her grip really is (her throat attack is something that Navy Seals would envy) we knew it wasn’t long before she was exploring the world around her.
It took her awhile to perfect the crawl, instead opting for the more hip hop caterpillar move across the floor. She sometimes looked like she was army crawling towards you which was fun to watch. Suddenly though, one day she got the crawling down to a T. Must be the same with many parents, the baby looks as if they are struggling to crawl, then BAM, they’ve figured it out and have disappeared from your sight without you even realizing. Only those who have seen it first hand know how fast babies can move once they’ve learned to crawl, it’s crazy fast. So now my wife can leave her in the living room or on the floor, with toys or without, and she’s happy to crawl, roll and play till she realizes mother is trying to do something and cries. It was when my wife was doing something else that it happened.
Sitting down for the first time that day, my other half takes her seat on the sofa, The Goldbergs on the TV (a GREAT show) and flicks through her Facebook timeline to catch up on the life of her friends and random funny images that people post. Her eye is suddenly distracted by a small head popping up over the sofa, hands clinging to the cushion and smiling like she always does. She was up, she had pulled herself up and was standing. We discovered early on that she could take her weight on her legs and would stand for long periods of time with the help of someone holding her. Now she didn’t need us anymore, she had found the world around her. Taking a few pictures my wife then watched her shuffle herself around the sofa towards the magazine on the sofa (she had recently gotten a taste for the front cover and was craving more).
It’s fun to watch her stand up by herself, with the help of the things around her, and I don’t think it will be long before she’s up without any help. I do feel like she’s trying to grow up too quickly, but right now I can’t really tell her to slow down. I can, and do, but she doesn’t listen. She just smiles and laughs and carries on. Watching TV has defiantly changed as now every so often we get a small smiling (she looks like the Stay Puft Marsh mellow man) baby looking up at us from the edge of the sofa, her vice like grip clawing the sofa and keeping herself upright.