She's Mobile!

Tuesday, quite out of the blue, Butts started crawling. I say "quite out of the blue" as if she hasn't been working her way up to crawling for the past month or so, of course, but it still seemed very sudden how quickly she got it all figured out. One minute she was propping herself up on her hands and feet and then sliding forward a few inches and the next time I looked she was crawling. Pretty much within an hour she was able to get just about anywhere she wanted in the living room and dining room.

Then, yesterday, I decided maybe it was time to try the Chair Barrier again. The Chair Barrier was something I came up with to confine Gabe to the living room when he started to crawl. We have accordion gates up between the dining room and my office, the kitchen, and the stairs, but we don't have anything keeping a child from escaping the living room into the dining room (because the doorway in there was designed for double French doors or something and is FAR too big for any sort of gate). With Gabe, my concern was primarily motivated by the fact that we didn't really want to child proof the dining room. I laid two chairs down, interweaving the legs, so that they couldn't be pushed out of the doorway. Then I stuffed the holes with pillows to keep him from squeezing through. It actually worked pretty well for three months or so, until he figured out how to yank the pillows out and get between the chairs, at which point we had to baby proof the dining room.

So, yesterday, I thought to myself, "I REALLY don't want to re-baby proof the dining room, since it's filled with all of Gabe's small toys and other possible hazards. I'll rebuild the Chair Barrier. Gabe's big enough to crawl over it to get from the living room to the dining room. It will be perfect!"

No dice. Gabe COULD crawl over it, and did a few times, but then it became more fun for him to start tearing down the barrier so that he could move more easily between rooms (keeping in mind that he didn't NEED to move between rooms--and, in fact, wouldn't have if the barrier hadn't been there, but, because it was, he HAD to be in whatever room he wasn't currently in). So, Chair Barrier was a non-option this go 'round, sadly. It would have been too perfect, I suppose. So I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon sorting through all of Gabe's toys in the dining room and taking them up to his room, leaving only the ones that were big enough for her to play with and gave her free roam of the dining room as well.

Not surprisingly, this has not been a popular change with Gabe. He's spent the entire morning so far trying to sneak toys down from upstairs (or just throwing them down the stairs when he didn't feel like being sneaky), only to have me take them back up amidst crying protests. It's great fun.

But I did manage to get a little video of Norah crawling.

Before getting the video, I had to take a picture of her with a ring she found in her mouth. These rings were Gabe's favorite finger-toy and we have multiple pictures of him sitting in various places with a ring hanging out of his mouth. For posterity.

Obviously, I didn't have the gate to the stairway closed yet by this point (I did right after, and Gabe has since insisted that he wants to be upstairs or downstairs six times in thirty minutes--where, normally, he might never go upstairs during the day except for his nap).