Tuesday 5 April 2011

The One with the One Small Step for Babykind

The boy is on his feet and on the move!

However this is not the exciting statement it would first seem.

He's been pulling himself up and furniture surfing since he's been crawling but that was months ago and my prediction that he'd walk early and certainly by his first birthday has not come to fruition.

So now he's in his 13 month and according to all the books and Internet parenting sites (so it MUST be true) this is the prime month for walking.

On Mother's Day he did take a couple of unaided steps before lunging himself at me. I was so excited I declared that Nanny P and Grandad G must never sell their house and if they do I need the section of carpet where the boy first walked. I can just imagine them trying to make a sale to a vendor with a hole in their shag pile and the boy at 18 asking "Mum, why have I got a tiny rug in my keepsake box?".

However since Sunday there's been nothing. Every time I try and encourage him forward he smiles his cheekiest grin and works his way toward me using, furniture, fire guard or playpen. Once these have run out and he'd have to fly solo he sinks to his knees and does a sort of upright kneeling crawl instead.

It's a start I suppose and to be fair he is up and down with his walker like a whore's drawers (slightly vulgar yet favourite saying of mine and one I'll get in before the diversity training tomorrow at work and my right to ever say anything remotely controversial will be taken away from me forever).

The problem is we live in such a small house that as soon as he's done a few steps he hits an obstacle of some kind, a wall, a door, a bookcase, his highchair. There's not a long enough clear run for him to get going and as a result he gets frustrated and arsey. So I have to follow behind him, bent over like old man Steptoe, ready to turn boy and walker round and set them off on their merry, if truncated, way again!

It may be me, or it may be that my back won't take much more of this, but I feel under a tremendous pressure to get him to walk!

Everyone always asks is he walking yet but when you say no, not quite, I don't sense that they feel he's late at it., it's just a genuine enquiry and anyway why should I care?

All babies develop at their own pace and I always maintained that I wouldn't be a competitive Mum so I don't know what this is all about. I'm just hungry for progress I think and some news I can tell friends and family. Yes he is walking thank you very much. Mission accomplished!

The boy and his knees however, have other ideas.

We may have had one small step for this little man but there doesn't seem to be any giant leaps on the horizon yet...

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