Doin' the Evie Crawl

You may have noticed that I've referred to Evan being close to crawling in the past, but I've never announced that he's actually crawling. That's because he's never crawled. Ever since he was six months old (he's eleven months old now) it's seemed like he was on the verge of hopping up on his hands and knees and moving around, but he's never actually done it. Recently he's been focusing all his attention on trying to stand and walk, so we've been figuring he might skip moving on all fours and go straight to walking (which apparently happens fairly often nowadays since parents are told to have their babies sleep on their backs).

Just because he's not "crawling" doesn't mean he's immobile, though. For the last few weeks he's been moving around when he's sitting on the ground by stretching his legs out and then rocking forward onto his hands and feet (like a position he might use to stand up except he doesn't quite have the balance for that yet) and then sitting back down, which results in a net gain of a couple of inches for his butt. Think of it as a modified inchworm maneuver. It gets him where he wants to go eventually but it's pretty slow going, and he usually gets distracted by something else along the way to his destination.

This morning though he moved around in a manner that could reasonably be called crawling! He rocked forward into a hybrid crawling position with one leg as you'd expect (your basic hands-and-knees position) and the other leg curled under him like for sitting Indian-style. He then moved forward normally with the crawling leg and with his old sitting/starting-to-stand motion with the other leg. It's hard to describe... you can kinda see what I mean in this video Steph took later in the day:

What does this mean for us? Well, for starters it means that one of our projects for this holiday weekend is installing baby locks on the cabinets and plugging in a bunch of outlet covers. So much fun!