Forward Motion

Just a quick update, friends, to let you know that we're making some progress on the movement front--namely, we are now able to move forward. A little. Slowly.

Elliot isn't yet crawling, but he's figuring out these clever and peculiar little ways to get around. Before when he would push with his arms he would only go backwards. But now he can sort of pull himself along, or use his arms as sort of crutches while he swings his butt forwards. It's fascinating.

I was thinking about this after mom's group on Wednesday: all of our babies have such different styles of movement. Before having a baby I sort of thought that there was a natural progression from sitting to crawling to walking, but I'm realize more and more how individual and almost accidental these steps actually are. Each little babe has to reinvent the wheel, as it were, when it comes to their own personal means of transportation. There are no instructions for them to read.

It keeps reminding me of how sometimes in speech class in high school you have to give someone instructions how to do something simple, like make chocolate chip cookies, with the caveat being that your student can only do exactly what you tell them to do, and nothing more. So you have to spell it out for them. You can't just say "add the chocolate chips." You have to say, "move your hand to the spoon. open your fingers. put your fingers around the soon. close your fingers...." and so on.

So with Elliot--he's kind of in this stage, except that he has to make up the instructions himself, and the whole idea of step one ("move your hand to...wherever you want it to go") is already a big accomplishment. Part of me thought he'd be crawling by now, since he's clearly been wanting to for weeks. But I guess the surprise is not that he's going so slowly. The surprise is that any of us every learn to get anywhere at all.