As described last Wednesday, Dorothy has been walking (with assistance) for a couple of weeks now. She can also reliably push herself from her tummy back to a sitting position. The problem with this latter skill is that it's been making it harder to get her to crawl - as soon as we put her on her hands and knees, she pushes herself back to a sitting position. Multiple times, I've knelt over her, and moved her through the entire crawling sequence, one hand and one foot at a time. And if we grab her arms and hold them off the floor and pull them forward, then she's scooted her legs along in a crawling action to keep up. But she hasn't been purposefully crawling. Until now, that is.
On Sunday, I was playing with her in the living room, and she did what Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads calls the "Jacknife" crawl - one leg underneath, the other out to the side. She took three crawl "steps" to get to some toy, then sat up! So December 5th seems to be the day she first crawled all by herself, not on her tummy. Then tonight, after getting home from the pediatrician, we gave her some Motrin and she seemed to cheer up. She was on our bed, and crawled a couple of "steps" to get to a piece of paper the pediatrician gave us.
We'd sort of been hoping that Dorothy would wait until after we'd moved out of the house in early January to begin a truly mobile terror, but no such luck. Now we'll have to do the real baby-proofing, only to take it down in 5 weeks.
Posted by Tom Nugent at December 6, 2004 09:55 PM