9 Months Old Photo Gallery

Now that Justine has mastered crawling, she’s fallen back on trying to perfect another, more harrowing skill.  She now, at every chance possible, attempts to pull herself up to a standing position. This is actually much more frightening than I had initially imagined it being.

Now I’m ok with crawling.  While it’s true that we can no longer leave her for hours at a time and expect her to still be in the same place, and we’ve had to move my collection of knives, poisons, and recalled lead painted choking hazards off the floor where I had been storing them, she’s still, thanks to a variety of expensive barriers, confined to a central area.  So we can still steal away for a few moments to feed the cats, go to the bathroom, or briefly continue our experiments in cloning meatloaf.

But this “pulling herself up” business adds a whole new dimension to the issue.  Literally.  What’s the big deal?  Well, adding verticality to the mix significantly increases the chance of “rapid de-verticality” – in other words once she’s up she’ll probably go back down and in some cases in dramatic fashion.  Thus we end up gingerly standing nearby, our hands crouched at the ready should we need to swoop in and rescue our daughter as she tumbles to the ground, only to pull herself back up again, laughing at our overprotective designs.

There are three notable areas where she has learned to pull herself up with varying consequences.  The first is the table upon which our rabbit (Gizmo) lives her largely solitary existence.  Justine pulls herself up gingerly, sets her feet, and then with one hand attempts to either pet or jab at the bunny through her cage bars.  Gizmo is generally a sport about this, but occasionally is startled and gives a friendly honk and a not so friendly thump before retreating to the corner.  Justine, of course, finds this hilarious.  I just stand nearby, nervously eyeing the hardwood floor behind her.

I discovered the second locale on a Sunday morning as I was awakened while dreaming about living a life “under the sea” by the subtle screams of a newly alert infant.  Much to my dismay she met my gaze while standing in her crib, her hands resting on the crib rail and her mouth firmly gripping the rubber pad we installed only a week or two ago.  We have enough trouble with naps and sleeping – her ability to stand will probably make it a little more difficult to keep her in the prone and sleeping position.  Plus at some point she’ll probably figure out how to Mary Lou Retton out of there and then will be in big trouble.  I’m installing a trampoline underneath just in case.

Finally, she earned her new nickname pulling herself up at the last location – the fancy gate we have installed near our staircases (we live in a split level).  When we are in the kitchen, she’ll crawl over to the gate, pull herself up, and reach through the bars, either longing for one of us to pick her up or trying to snatch our wallets as we walk by.  In any case, her attempts at circumventing our baby containment system now have us dubbing her with yet another nickname:

JailBreak.

Things become mildly more complicated when your little one figures out how to roll over.  This precludes several normal infant resting spots, including atop the refrigerator and on the window sill next to the pie that you baked.  But again, for the most part, and with proper use of chocks and wedges, it is possible to get away for a few moments to shoo away the Mormons or place bets with your bookie.

But at some point, despite all of your attempts to dissuade the practice, the proverbial lightbulb will click in your child’s head, and things will suddenly, and irreversibly, change forever.

Yes friends, our little Justine has learned to crawl.

It was a slow but sure process with her, taking several weeks for her to put all the pieces together.  In what anthropologists have informed us is a fairly radical evolutionary mutation, she actually learned to pull herself into a sitting position before she learned to crawl.  That happened very suddenly, and we were both shocked to watch her do it.  From there we assumed crawling would be a snap.

Instead she laboriously practiced each individual component of the crawl, figuring out optimal launch angles, head position, and thigh-leg force quotients.  She started by assuming the “position,” the classic “all fours.”  It took her awhile to get her legs untangled – for about a week she was doing a patented “all three and a half.”  After she mastered that she’d go up into the launch, and then rock forward, and then back into a sitting position.  She would do this over and over again, and Kim and I would both sit forward, anticipating that “this was it.”  Eventually we stopped paying attention, me going back to my organizing my lint collection by color and material and Kim practicing her squirrel calls.

Finally, one day she lunged forward and made a few tentative crawls before the expected Maggie Simpson landed her face-first in the carpet.  Unfazed, she’d continue this learning process until she finally figured it out.  We helped her along by enticing her to crawl in different directions, whether it be by waving an iPhone, dropping a ball, or tethering one of the cats to her.  Now, she’s a crawling master, undeterred from undertaking epic quests and crossing entire rooms to bag whatever quarry she may be after.  You know what this means.

Time to lock up the liquor cabinet.  And EVERYTHING else.