Aboutcan I brag just a little?
…but only because I felt like Claudine was so behind in her gross motor development for most of her first 17 months. She never learned to crawl (and still can’t, although sometimes she tries and it’s pretty funny), walked late, and just seemed generally unmotivated to move. This was a baby who couldn’t pull up to standing or sit up from laying down until she was well over a year. I’d put her on her back on the floor to see if she would move and she’d just lay there. For an hour. Not rolling over or scooting or…anything. And this wasn’t at 5 months, this was at 11 months. She’d always been a mellow baby, and her ability to put herself to sleep by herself from a very early age without crying or fussing was the stuff of envy, but I also thought she was truly lazy. Most of the time I was too busy to really take note of her delays, but there were moments when I was really concerned that something was wrong. Maybe, just maybe, that bad car accident that we all closely escaped from when she was just 6 weeks old rattled her head more than we knew. The paramedics checked her out and she seemed ok at the time, but how could we really know? Why wasn’t she moving?
But you know, maybe all that laying around on her back was spent concentrating on listening to people speak because she is having a language explosion right now at 19 months. She actually walked by Mark yesterday and casually said “bye bye Daddy. See you later”. Wha??? She’s constantly surprising us like that. She can identify letters of the alphabet, sing the beginning of the ABC song, and name shapes like oval and triangle. She goes about her day narrating everything she does. Mia developed pretty much at the same pace, but because she seemed to do everything early, it didn’t take us too much by surprise.
Now, I know it’s annoying to hear other people talk about their kids all the time so I’ll stop. But I’m really proud of my little girl (who looks about 4 in that first photo, doesn’t she??)
