On the move...

In my (short) journey into parenthood so far I'm learning that it's a series of challenges and difficult decisions. There's a whole lot of great and rewarding...but it's definitely challenging. One of the early challenges was figuring out how to teach Little Monster how to sleep without either him or us getting too upset. It was painful at the time but we got over that challenge and, like most things, it doesn't seem half as bad looking back on it.

More recently, we decided we needed to address Little Monster's lack of movement. At a year old, it had reached the point where we were pretty sure that he could move if he chose to, it was more a case of motivation. The worst part was, we felt like we were the cause of the problem. From an early age, he loved being walked around holding onto our hands and we did it so much that I think he just thought that that was normal. Who would want to learn to move around at floor level when Mummy and Daddy will walk you around on your feet?

So a few weeks ago, we decided to force the issue and started refusing to walk him around whenever he cried. Now that I'm back at work, the weekends are even more precious and it was pretty horrible for all of us sitting with a screaming child. We tried putting objects on the floor out of reach, we tried encouragement, we tried leaving the room. In the end, the clincher was a killer combo of two iPhones and a remote control. So if anyone's wondering, that's you get a baby to crawl.

A couple of weeks on, he has pretty much perfected his slithery commando crawl and will now travel about pretty happily. He's even working on pulling himself up at nursery. Here's a slightly fuzzy pic of the man in action at nursery.