Rambling Rhodes

First Steps, Sort Of

My infant son spent basically all of June insisting on relying on the army crawl technique as his preferred method of locomotion. For an entire month, like some sort of wounded soldier, he dragged himself around the house, and I could always tell where he was based entirely on the sounds of his strained, grunting breathing as he exerted way too much energy to go from one room to another.

On Monday, June 28, he had his nine-month doctor's check-up. When he returned home and was placed on the floor, it was if he just flipped a mental switch and he was suddenly crawling all over the place using the standard baby crawl technique. It was an amazingly fast transition that took us completely by surprise. In a single day, we went from being able to follow the sounds of our army-crawling baby, to frantically chasing the curious little terror all around the house.

When we finished most of the basement earlier this year, I thought the unfurnished family room would be an excellent place for my son to crawl around in; it's spacious, carpeted and almost completely free of obstacles. I thought I'd be able to put him down in the basement and he'd be crawling in a hazard free environment.

Much to my surprise, when I put my boy down in the basement family room last night, he covered the distance from one end of the room to the other in ridiculously fast time, and I practically had to catapult myself over to the stairway when the little stuntman managed to get to the third step in just a few short seconds. I didn't want to discourage his efforts, but I simply couldn't believe it when he was over halfway up the stairs. I mean, he'd never climbed a single stair in his life, but yet there he was zipping up the staircase as if he'd been doing it from day one.

And his sheer determination was also remarkable. Even though I was hovering right behind him, ready to catch him at the slightest sign of a misstep, he kept his eyes locked on that top step. That was his goal, and he wasn't going to be denied.

In the end, however, his reserve of baby energy proved to be his Achilles heel. After burning so much energy crawling around the basement, he had to abandon his quest a mere four steps away from the top, at which point he just stopped his progress, sat on the step and panted, like an Everest hiker at high elevation.

And so we begin the next phase of baby vigilance. His world has now gotten much larger and more accessible, and our world has gotten much more interesting.

Posted by Ryan at July 8, 2010 08:19 PM | TrackBack