7 months and crawling

This month I’ve realised yet another difference between motherhood first time around versus second time:

First time = can’t wait for baby to do new tricks. Worry baby isn’t “keeping up” with other babies.

Second time = do an inward sigh of sadness when your tiny baby starts crawling at just six and a half months. WHERE HAS MY LITTLE SCRAP OF A BABY GONE?! Wail. etc.

Baby Girl is seven months old today and has, for the past two weeks, perfected the art of commando crawling. She pushes her strong legs up, hefts herself high onto her front and then reaches out and pulls. Despite not yet mastering the coordination needed to do a running crawl, she can get around pretty fast this way. It’s absolute chaos. 

My newly mobile second daughter is enjoying a reign of destruction across the house, as she eats her sister’s My Little Pony magazines and covers the sofa in Frog’s beloved Frozen stickers before pulling all the clean washing off the radiator and making a beeline for my collection of candles. We’ve taken to moving all our stuff out of the way and replacing it with her toys, dotted around on low shelves and in corners, in an attempt at reverse baby psychology. Maybe if she thinks they’re out of bounds she’ll actually play with them…

It’s messy and chaotic but, I’ll be honest, a huge amount of fun. We’ve nicknamed her The Destroyer because Baby Girl is so good at trashing stuff. But she does it with such a big smile on her face and is so jolly and good humoured that we can’t help but grin back. Suckers.

Every day I think I catch a little glimpse of the toddler she’s going to be. At seven months she already has such a strong personality. She’s easy to please, happy-go-lucky, boisterous and cuddly. Her favourite thing is to bash and cuddle, often at the same time. She’ll often stop mid-breastfeed to look up and grin at me, before reaching up to bash me on the chin. She finds the whole thing hilarious, and a baby’s giggles are infectious. Fact.

In typical baby fashion, you know Baby Girl’s up to something when she goes quiet. The other day I came out of the bathroom to find her trying to sneak into my bedroom and eat a pair of my pants from the clean laundry pile. At first glance, only her little chubby legs were visible…

We’ve come to realise that Baby Girl is an absolutely brilliant sleeper… if she’s got company. This means she’s inevitably downstairs asleep on us or the sofa at some point in the evening after being put to bed, and then (obviously) in our bed all night too. I’m woken up around 6am most mornings by an affectionate bash from a chubby fist or a grinning face two millimetres from my own. I do wonder how long she’s been staring at me smiling when she does that, mind.

Things definitely get interesting from now on.

 

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Read Baby Girl’s six month update here, or her five month update here, or four months here. 

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