Murdza sent me a link to a short video clip of his son, Walker, taking his first steps. That was actually pretty exciting seeing a child started walking for the first time right in front of you. Seeing how fast and steady Walker was crawling all over the place, we started wondering why Bryan is taking his time with this “self mobility” business. Every child has a different development schedule and all, but when he’s falling behind on something, perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at what was REALLY happening.
It turns out that Bryan has been too cautious with the idea of being “hurt”. He drawls just fine on our bed (admittedly, he still falls face down on the mattress because it’s still relatively too soft), but when we put him on the hardwood floor, he refuses to crawl… because he knows it hurt if he falls face down… And crawling on the stupid hardwood floor hurts his knees….. What the hell!
So Grace started putting a spare area rug that Margaret had given us on the livingroom floor to encourage Bryan to crawl to her and/or to his toys. The “area rug” experiment worked wonders. In just two days, he can now fly across the area rug to his destination… sometimes in tears because he REALLY doesn’t want to do it. But hey, the kid’s gotta learn to move around sooner or later.
Now the task of child-proofing the apartment begins. Joys of early childhood development!