She'll Be Walking Before We Know It

Abby LOVES her "LeapFrog Learning Table." Yesterday, we finally put the legs on it because she is constantly all over it. Plus, she's gotten pretty good at pushing herself to standing with her legs when an object is the right height. She doesn't pull herself up with her upper body. Instead, she pulls herself up to kneeling, then uses her lower body to straighten out her legs. If the object she has used to hold herself up is the right height, she is standing straight up. Otherwise, she ends up bent over. So far, the only object she can stand straight up right away with is us. If we're on the floor lying sideways, she can easily use our shirts and our bodies for leverage and get herself to standing. This is one of her favorite things to do. She is constantly climbing all over us. Also, she's figured out how to climb over our calves to get to the other side.

Another favorite object to stand bent over on is the Learning Table, so we figured with the legs on it would be a good height for her to practice standing. She hasn't quite gotten there yet, but she easily gets up onto her knees, and she's definitely trying to stand. She just can't rest her weight on it like she can with us to make it easier to straighten out her legs. She is LOVING the new challenge, though.













If we stand her up on the table, she can stand there and play with the buttons at the same time for several minutes before falling on her tush.





Oh yeah, a day or two after the last post, the "commando crawling" disappeared. Abby is officially an honest to goodness crawler. We give her the run of the basement (that's where the majority of her pictures are taken), so whenever we put her down in a different spot, she doesn't go too far yet. She scopes it out, looks at me to make sure it's ok, and takes a couple steps before sitting down and starting over. She usually goes in a circle like this. It takes me putting her down a few times in the same spot before she's comfortable taking off. Jake, it's time to put the gate back up. I set her down on the floor in the kitchen while I prepare a bottle, but now she's gotten comfortable enough that she's heading towards the basement stairs. The booboo on her forehead in the first picture is from her attempts to stand in the kitchen. Whenever she's crawling around, she always stops to lift her lower half up straight, but since there's nothing below her but ground she can't straighten out. Anyway, Abby was wearing socks, so she was too slippery when she was bent over with her head a couple inches from the floor. She lost her balance and went the rest of the way forward.

OH, I almost forgot. One day last week, Abby was playing on her LeapFrog deal, and she had a rattle in one had while she was doing her usual attempts to stand. Well, she actually managed to straighten out her upper half without holding onto anything! She only lasted a second before she collapsed, but still.