Everything I Need to Know about Transporting Babies I've Learned from My One Year Old

Since she began to crawl, Norah has been very industrious about how she moves the things she wants to play with from one place to the next. Gabe wasn't really concerned with such triviality. He moved about at a goodly clip and was more interested in finding what lay ahead at wherever his next stop happened to be. Norah, on the other hand, likes to take things with her.

As I've illustrated before, her favorite method of transport has been her mouth. She's stick something in her mouth, crawl to wherever she wants to go, then pull the item out of her mouth. She does this with most things--baby dolls, her bottle, small farm animals, she tried it with our cat Typhoon once (with not-very-good results). If she has more items than she can carry in her mouth that she wants moved, she adopts a scoot and throw methodology that works pretty well--she scoots forward a foot or so, throws the items she wants to keep track of in front of her, then scoots forward until she reaches them. Usually she'll also have something in her mouth while she's doing this. As I said, she's very industrious.

Now we've added a new wrinkle into the mix. She is VERY close to walking (since Friday, she's been working on standing unsupported--and she's quite proud when she does it, smiling big and crowing a bit for whatever audience she has), so we brought out the little walk-along car/scooter/whatever thingy that we got for Gabe. Gabe hardly used it, preferring, instead, to toddle headlong into whatever was in his way, unsupported and uncaring of the consequences. Norah has been considerably more thoughtful in her approach to walking, so she's made some use of the assistance the scooter offers.

Now, however, she has a NEW way to move things from one place to the next.

Queue video:

Obviously, we've got a little ground to cover before she's ready to do any babysitting.