The Crawler

Forget inert baby, roller, supported sitter, and sitter. My baby is now a crawling machine. She started crawling almost two weeks ago, two days before her seven-month birthday, and she's pretty fast at moving around now. She looks like a little bug as she scurries across the floor; it's pretty cute. I love that she'll come to find me if I'm in the other room. I also love that she'll lift up her arms for me to pick her up. I think she likes me!

Although I knew Madeline was about to crawl (she had been rocking back and forth on her hands and knees for a while), I wasn't prepared to see her start standing up on her own. Pretty much the second she started crawling, though, she decided it was a good idea to stand up. If she's in the middle of the room and there's nothing tall enough to pull herself up with, she'll just straighten out her arms and legs and then look around like, "What next, Mom?"

As you can see, she's really into her new skills. She tries to pull herself up with whatever is available, even if that means my face.

I love watching Madeline learn, so watching her new tricks has been exciting. I'm not anxious for her to grow up at all, but it's so much fun to watch her figure out how to do things and to see how excited she gets. Somehow I think her initial troubles with weight gain have made me marvel more over every little success, including developing power thighs. Oh, how I love her power thighs and her chubby little belly! We went to the CF clinic two weeks ago, and everyone there simply raved over how great she looks and how well she's doing on weight gain. Definitely what we like to hear!