There she goes
In the end, it was the whisk that did it. After weeks of really trying to coax Hadley to crawl, our one-year-old finally moved independently just days before her birthday. We’d been encouraging her with the rocking motion, proper leg placement, etc., that we’d learned from months of physical therapy with our son.
It took a while. And that’s OK. Knowing how challenging life with two young kids can be when one is still stationary, I actually wasn’t in a hurry to get Hadley up and about before she was ready. My husband and I have been surprisingly patient about the whole thing.
That’s a difference between Baby No. 1 and Baby No. 2, no doubt. With Oliver, especially given his prematurity, I spent a great deal of time worrying about what milestones he hadn’t reached and how far “behind” he was. Any mention of his delays put on me on the defense, and I agonized over whether his early birth would have lifelong repercussions.
Those aren’t the things they talk about in baby books.
Ollie didn’t sit unassisted until close to his first birthday, and took much longer to start crawling. And walking? Well.
What’s funny is, of course, you’d never guess any of that now. Everything we went through to get Oliver “caught up” (which is all relative, by the way) is long in the past . . . except that, sometimes, it doesn’t feel so long ago at all.
I have a different perspective with our daughter because of everything we went through with her brother. I thought she’d be on the move quickly, what with Oliver running literal circles around her, but she’s a calm one — and being on her own timeline isn’t a problem. Hadley has been content to watch the circus without climbing the trapeze herself.
What’s funny is that a room full of rattles, light-up robots, tiny balls and baby dolls has been of little interest to Hadley. We knew she would start to scoot when she saw something out of grasp she wanted, but nothing was compelling enough to get her to crawl over and snatch it up.
Oliver recently figured out how to make his own ladder by pushing a dining room chair across the room. Our last hiding space for keeping items out of reach (but still accessible) on the kitchen counter is now gone, so I’m learning to get creative about that.
Gone are the steak knives, kitchen shears and fancy chopsticks from San Francisco. A high shelf in the corner cabinet now holds anything pointy, which makes my stomach churn at the disorganization of it all — but safety is, of course, the most important thing. Especially with a tall toddler on the loose.
What Ollie can reach? The utensils stuffed into a holder I bought Spencer when he first moved into his apartment. The man had been piling his wooden spoons and tongs on the counter, for goodness’ sake. Who wouldn’t intervene?
Oliver loves to “cook” with us, so he is forever dragging his chair over to pretend to prepare breakfast at the stove. This gives me a heart attack, of course. Luckily the sound of the chair legs scraping across the room is unmistakable, so Ollie doesn’t get very far without supervision. But still.
Oddly enough, our son’s favorite plaything is a silver whisk. He calls it something else — a word I wouldn’t even know how to begin writing out — but it is, indeed, a whisk. Considering I only use said utensil when I’m baking and I rarely have time or calories to burn on sweets, it’s fine for Ollie to carry it around.
And he does. Whisk is used to “make soup” in the back of a yellow dump truck, or “stir” in the bed of a wagon. Oliver pretends to make food and offer me the whisk to sample his invisible, tasteless creations, and I dutifully try each “dish.”
Apparently Hadley is equally captivated by the whisk, given that’s what finally inspired her to swoop in and grab her brother’s favorite object. Ollie dropped the item in question and took off with something else that is absolutely not a toy (a silver dollar, useless raffle ticket, bottle of nail polish — you name it).
Sensing her opportunity, Hadley got up the gumption to move in for the steal. I was watching the whole thing play out with my iPhone poised to record the big moment. After days of thinking she was finally going to do it, of course this all happened on the one night my husband wasn’t home.
I debated waiting to tell Spencer after he returned from his class, or to avoid saying anything and let him discover it on his own. But in the end, I was too excited to keep it to myself. I sent text messages right away.
“Finally happened!” I wrote my husband.
“Guess who’s on the move?” I sent my family, adding a photo of Hadley with a look of absolute concentration as she retreated with her whisk.
That was a few weeks ago. True to her personality, Hadley is back to crawling only when she sees something of interest. It’s not enough to see Oliver or cousin Autumn getting into all the nooks and crannies they’ve been ordered not to; Hadley wants to make sure there’s something in it for her, you know? Gold at the end of this rainbow of exertion.
Can’t say I blame her. Though I tend to respond better to cookies — not whisks.