The Crawler

This last week has been one of Zane’s biggest weeks of physical change that I can remember. Not only has he spent tons of time standing but as the week wound down he has also taken up crawling with a fervor. Toss in a side of sitting up on his own with a few dashes of being able to stand up from certain positions and, well, you can guess what’s moved up on our to-do list.

Baby proofing the house.

Crawling is an interesting process to watch. At first he’s been doing what I call the Inch Worm, where he raises his butt as high as possible, with toes and head on the ground, and then slides his head forward across the ground. Not a scalable method and it’s gotta be uncomfortable. Then he experimented with rolling: rolling left, rolling right, each time moving his little body forward a few more inches. And then sometime in the last week and a half he resolved that this hands-n-knees technique everyone has been showing him might just work.

He still tosses in the other techniques, but today he moved all around the kitchen by moving his legs and pulling with his arms. The right arm is the pivot/muscle and the left arm is more dextrous, doing the balancing and some pulling. He hasn’t worked out the muscles or technique to get up on all fours for crawling, which is probably a good thing as he is limited in speed for now. And, since he’s not limited in curiosity, that works in our favor.

The week we were in DC he sat up for the first time on his own and we almost didn’t notice it. He did it a few times and then nothing again for a week. This morning Faith put him down for a nap at his usual time but he wasn’t quite ready for it. He rolled around, inched around, played with the crib bars and sort of nodded off a few times. Faith and I were half watching over the webcam and we suddenly saw this.

“Hey, do you see that?” Faith says.

“Yeah, how’d he do it? says I.

Zane heard us over the telepathic baby network and was good enough to do it two more times in quick succession. Pretty amazing. I remember when he first started sitting and we’d worry about him falling over, surrounding him in pillows or hovering nearby. Now it’s not a problem at all. He’s been going through a similar physical learning process with his standing. I’m at the point where I usually don’t put down pillows and can even leave him standing by himself without worrying much. Once a day I’ll stand him up by himself and let go, just to see how his balance is.

Oh, and then catch him.