Milestones

When we got Amoura at 7.5 months old, she was already crawling.  Emily reminded me recently that right at first she almost drug one of her legs instead of actually using it, but she crawled.  When you left her in a room alone, even for a second, she cried and crawled after you.  I remember people asking me if she could crawl yet and thinking, “Of course she can crawl, you idiot, she’s 8 (or however many) months old.”  You see, back then, I knew it all.  All babies could or at least should do things on a similar timetable because my baby did.  She was a formula baby, so she ate on a schedule (you know how I love schedules) and she slept through the night.  I just ASSumed that all babies were the same.  And then Layla was born, and except for a mutual adoration for one another, my girls are about as different as night and day. 

As of Sunday, Layla is 11 months old.  Just last week she began sleeping through the night.  By “through the night,” I mean she goes down around 7:30pm and wakes to eat by 6am the following morning.  By “just this week” I mean 4 of the last 7 nights.  I DO NOT mean the one night in which she got up twice after not going to bed until after 8pm.  Her middle of the night wakings have honestly not been as bad as they sound or as I would have thought they’d be. We did a little “sleep training” around five months to get her to go down for bed and naps awake and we could have used similar methods to get her sleeping through the night sooner.  I just didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do.  She’s already pretty tiny, so cutting out a feeding seemed like a rather bad idea.

Side note on the sleep training- I have surprised myself at how “crunchy” I’ve become parenting Layla, and sleep training-especially any kind that involves crying- is frowned upon, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.  We used The Happy Sleeper method.  Mom who does not read (can read, just chooses not to, mind you) even read the book.  We hunkered down and prepared for a week of misery, and by night three, she was an old pro.  We’ve actually created somewhat of a monster who only wants to sleep lying down alone in a dark room snuggling her lovey.  She only gets her lovey in her crib and since she doesn’t know any difference, she is fine with that. Side note over.

I have to admit that for a while, I was driving myself crazy with baby milestones.  It’s hard to have had a baby who met most milestones on the early side and then quickly experiencing your very own flesh and blood child meeting them on the late side (which is me being generous in my wording).  I know Layla was technically, three weeks early, but she also has had several advantages that Amoura did not have that I would have thought would’ve made a difference.  Layla was exclusively breast fed for first six months of her life.  She is still nursing and I am choosy about what foods she eats.  We did not give her baby cereal (no need- no real nutrition there), and we did “Baby Led Weaning” when we introduced food.  That basically just means we skipped pureed food and went straight to giving her small bites of soft, whole food.  Sweet potatoes and avocado were her first foods.  She loved both and has been a great eater since her first bite.  Amoura lived on Gerber jars and started rice cereal before 4 months.  She also ate her weight in puff weekly whereas Layla has only ever had baby food prunes (because, you know) and has recently started eating puffs on rare occasions when we’re out in public and she needs a quick and easy snack. My point is not that these choices make me Supermom or that moms who don’t make these choices aren’t as good as mothering as I am.  My point is, while I believe in the choices we’ve made and truly think they’re the best way to go, my 11 month old isn’t crawling.  She’s just not there yet.  She has finally started acting like she might be sort of interested in the idea of being mobile, she just can’t figure out how to make it happen.  It’s gotten really fun to watch her try and attempt with great determination to capture her first movements on film. 

Full disclosure? The whole milestone thing has been a humbling experience for me.  I’ve been known to creep on other mama’s Face.book pages and Instagrams and check to see how old their kids are that are mobile.  I’ve offered to pay them each week in the nursery if they’ll teach her to crawl while she’s there.  I know she’ll get the hang of it eventually; I just want everything to come easy to her.  The prospect of her doing everything slow is a little scary to me.  When I am being realistic, I don’t think she is seriously behind, but sometimes that FTM fear takes over and I freak out a little.  I also know how excited we’ll be when she does make that first move.  I literally jumped for joy when I discovered her first tooth had popped through.  This is such a fun time and the suspense and expectation of her crawling is almost more than I can bear! 

PS- It drives me nuts when people say, “oh, you don’t want her to crawl, then it’ll all be over,” or “just wait until she’s into everything.”  I had a crawling baby for quite sometime and I found it thrilling.

Now what?