Swifty the wonder kid

Liza is making up for lost time in the crawling department, progressing in the past week from "crawling for the first time" to "crawling if we put something tantalizing enough slightly more than 2' away from her" to the more recent "crawling to try to find me if I leave the room." This includes the interesting variations such as "crawling across the room to remove every single DVD from the shelves she can reach, then trying to stack them back up on the shelf and instead spilling them on her head" and "crawling in slow motion after the cats, one of which seems to have slowed down so Liza will think she has a shot at catching her." My personal favorite happened after her bath tonight, when I set her down on her hooded towel next to the tub, pulled up the hood, and reached back in to the tub to wring out her washcloth. Liza was off like a shot, hooded towel firmly on her head and draped over her whole body, in a race to get to the Chlorox-CleanUp-laced sponge I overlooked in my child-proofing festival last week. All you could see was this towel scooting across the floor ... it was hilarious. I savored it for at least a tenth of a second before I wrenched the toxic sponge out of her hand and gave her a toy instead.

Diapering Liza has become a combination between a wrestling match and a no-holds barred street brawl, with additional helpings of bribery, distraction and frustration thrown in for good measure. Yesterday we went to visit some friends at dinner time, and when I tried to change Liza's diaper she took off, pantsless, across their living room floor. There's nothing like having to play "tackle the naked tushie" every time she pees. I had to resort to trying to change her diaper while she was standing up holding on to my shirt ... which could be why she woke up last night at midnight, an archipelago in the sea of urine that her crib had become. Apparently I still need some practice to get the vertical diapering to work.

Liza's OT therapist was pleased with her progress when we met with her last week, but she cautioned me that we want to try to keep Liza crawling and/or prone for as long as we can to build up some of the muscles and balance that she's lacking. Liza has other ideas, though, and taught herself how to pull up yesterday. She pulled up on my leg several times, even on the uneven footing of our friends' front yard, and Jason has video of her pulling herself up on the bottom step of our main staircase in order to reach a toy. We've also caught her going up onto both hands and both feet a couple of times ... she can't get upright yet, but it doesn't look like that's too far off. I pulled "Mother's Perogative" and gave Jason a hard time about actually encouraging her to pull up on the stairs. There's nothing like directly disobeying the therapist's recommendation, unless it's doing so in a way that encourages the child to play in a dangerous area, strictly because you want to get it on video. I swear - sometimes I wonder if he's related to those people who smeared honey on the face of their kid so they could get cute photos of the wild bear licking it off (who then ended up with a mauled kid). Nah, he's not that bad - and I shouldn't say anything, since most of the falling and/or choking incidents were my responsibility, not his. But still - "Let's teach our toddler to play on the stairs" isn't the wisest move!

With Liza on the move so much now I'm going to have even less time to write, which is probably a good thing. Trying to keep her happy while prone, and/or out of trouble when she's up, is a full-time job, as is picking up the trail of destruction she leaves in her wake when she passes through a room. Sometimes as I pick up her huge pile of toys for the n-th time today I wonder why I was in such a hurry to get her moving, and then I look over and see her crawl over to pet the kitty or stand up on her knees to pull magnets off of the refrigerator, and all the tidying up seems worth it.