Independent Forward Motion

Dominic has decided to join the Movers and Shakers.  He's always been good at shaking - he bops up and down on his knees or his bottom and gets amazing amounts of lift - but on April first, he decided to crawl for the first time!

Having spent the last couple of weeks fooled by his false starts, we knew this was coming, and had cameras ready.  The honest-to-goodness crawling starts around 1:30 in to this video; until then he's only teasing.  You also get to see the double-hand-wiggles he likes to engage in.  He does it a lot; Eddie never did, and we're wondering what it might translate to in the future!

It was filmed in our bedroom in the evening so I had to adjust the brightness; apologies for any strange effects related to that.  Also, I love what he does when he actually gets to his object of desire.

He started crawling at 7 months and three weeks, a mere week after Eddie did.  If I recall correctly, Eddie was more of a surprise!crawler.  She didn't give off a lot of "warning, crawling soon!" signs the way Dominic has been.  And then when she did start crawling, man, she was everywhere.  And she'd crawl off in a long straight line outside, just exploring.  Martin has a picture of her several hundred feet away, across a large playpark in our area, as well as some funny photos of "baby trails" left in the park's bark chips, showing where she had gone back and forth between play structures.

Dominic, on the other hand, has a preference for moving just far enough as necessary to get whatever it is he wants to play with, which is usually only a foot or two away.  He seems to be much more bottom heavy than Eddie was, with very little toppling while seated, and of course he's always been a bit larger than Eddie was every step of the way.  Eddie needed an elaborate pillow fort on three sides of her while sitting playing with things at this age, because she would inevitably fall over in a random direction.  Now that Dom knows how to crawl, he still only makes the effort when he really wants to.  He'd rather hang out near something interesting and maybe try pulling up on it and seeing what life is like on a higher plane of existence.

As a result of his newfound mobility, he has moved up to the next room at Daycare, full of tots slightly older than him who are at varying levels of crawling or walking.  The move is partially to inspire him and partially to give him something else to do besides try to pull the ears off of his poor immobile friends in the Infant room.