Goodbye to the Perpetual 7-month-old. This One's Going in the Book!

14 months, 1 week, and 6 days.

Ever since Smooch's chiropractic appointment, she has been using her left leg successfully while on all fours. In fact, she showed such improvement (immediately) that I have to wonder if the misalignment of her pelvis had been causing her discomfort all of this time, affecting her desire to do x y and z.

I feel like a big jerk for waiting all this time to take her.

Here we are five days and one physical therapy session later (which was yesterday), and BOOM! She's got it! See for yourself. (Sorry about the lousy quality of the phone video.)



Yup, I am a proud momma.

This video of course isn't the first moment she crawled. It happened immediately after breakfast this morning. I was sitting at the dining table playing "Kitty blocks" with Princess (Duplos for girls - it has a cat character), and I sat Smooch down on the floor next to me with some toys spread about. I looked down because, unlike every previous day, I did not hear incessant fussing about the fact that she couldn't effortlessly reach the toys. She had pulled herself onto all fours and was crawling toward...a piece of food. Ha ha. She likes to find crumbs and give them to me while she says "denk youuuu!" I tell you the truth that I got choked up and nearly burst into tears. Can I just say FINALLY!?

And for all the people in the world who keep telling me stories about how this and that child didn't crawl until such and such age, and so-and-so never crawled (all very sweet and intended to make me feel good), please let me just make a clarifying point.  Smooch wasn't crawling. Okay. No big deal. Except that she wasn't doing anything except sitting. No scooting, rolling from point A to point B, creeping, nothing. It was that issue, rather than so much the lack of crawling, that made her qualify so readily to receive physical therapy services. That being the case, my happy-go-lucky baby was turning into a clingy, angry little thing. Literally her personality was beginning to change as she grew more and more frustrated about how "stuck" she was. Unless she was being held. I could not walk more than 10 feet from her without her crying out for me. She was dependant on us for mobility like a 6-month-old but had the mental capacity and every other skill of a 14-month old. Of course, we didn't carry her around all the time, and we made her practice her budding skills each day. This made her very angry and made our house a few decibels louder than we prefer. Quite frankly, I felt that she was hitting a wall with her progress in the area of crawling. Enter Dr. E the chiropractor and the rest is history.

Glorious SUCCESS!

And do you know what? Little Miss Sunshine has returned today. I am telling you, she is back to her old self just like that! I took a shower without a fuss out of her, thank you Jesus. Yesterday, she would have let me hear it the entire...5 minutes. (Yes, you just learn to be fast.)  Today, my shower was 10 minutes. 

Oh shoot. I just realized where all these newly sprouted gray hairs came from.

And are you ready for this? Today, for the first time ever, Princess gave Smooch a good, sisterly shove. Suddenly, little sis isn't so safe to play near. She is a threat to Princess's things (and her orderly little world). Smooch is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing threat. Let the sibling wars begin! I am READY...just as soon as I finish baby-proofing.