Crawling

Kendra has been working on crawling. If she’s properly motivated (i.e. if Mom’s cell phone or something else that she is NEVER supposed to touch is just out of reach), then she can scoot forward in a great little army crawl. Occasionally she’ll even manage to get her knees underneath her for a bit, but it’s nothing terribly impressive, to tell you the truth. Bentley didn’t really crawl until he was about nine months old, so I wasn’t too worried about how slow Kendra’s been. Until yesterday, when I watched a couple of my friends’ babies and saw how good they both were at crawling (one is two months older than Kendra, the other is one month younger, and the older one has been crawling for forever now). So I decided I should be better about putting her on the floor so she can improve her crawling.

And then, tonight, as I tried to do this, I realized why Kendra is so bad at crawling still. His name is Bentley. During the hour that she was on the floor, I sat with my arms flung out around her so that Bentley could not: a) take away whatever toy she was scooting towards; b) step on her; c) lay down on her (he thinks he’s sharing tummy time with her); d) head-butt her (that’s his version of a hug, so he meant well, but try explaining that to Kendra!). I also tried distracting Bentley by reading to him and giving him other toys, and finally wound up putting him in time out (lots of crying and pleas of “Saw-ee Mommy!” during those two minutes!). But the over all lesson that I got from this little venture is that Kendra may not be so hot at crawling, but by golly I keep her from being traumatized by her brother all day long. And that will just have to be good enough for now!