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I’ve been saying “Martha is almost crawling” for months. She’s always been pretty strong so when she started pushing up onto her arms and then doing this swimmy thing on the floor, I thought it would only be a couple of weeks before she was crawling around. But it wasn’t. Instead of crawling right off, she started looking at things, pushing up on her arms, and scooting backwards. And I thought well now she’s ready. But she wasn’t. The next step was getting up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth. Surely now she’ll crawl, I thought. But she didn’t.
She did figure out how to get from her tummy, onto her hands and knees, and then into sitting. She figured it out one day and it took her about a week and a half to get really good at it. About that time she started moving one or two limbs forward before flopping on her tummy. Yesterday she got coordinated enough to do all four limbs once before flopping. And today, she finally officially crawled. And did it pretty well. She still dives onto her tummy right before she gets to her destination and scoots the last little bit, but she couldn’t crawl at all yesterday and today she can do it.

This milestone seems particularly wonderful and awesome. And here I’m using the traditional sense of those words. My mind is a little boggled that nearly ten months ago, when this tiny person entered the world she was so small and fragile that her very heartbeat and breath needed to be monitored constantly. And now she can move around all on her own. Unlike growing taller and bigger which just happen, or rolling over which is also somewhat inevitable, or sitting up which can be done with aids, crawling is difficult and there are no shortcuts. I know how hard she worked to be able to do it, and I’m impressed.