Skill Surge

While Wesley's growth continually builds, there are periods of slower prep and then bursts where many skills come to fruition at once. For months he has been working toward the onslaught of new abilities attained this past week. Utilizing my advanced MBA skills, I have provided visual representation of this concept.

Each time one of these skill surges occurs, I am a step or two behind. We have to readjust, and I inevitably fail for a couple of days. There is extra crying, there is frustration, there is less than needed and different than normal sleep, and confusion abounds. We are a little haggard from the experience, but then we have a day of napping together, and we find a nice rhythm again, and get synched up in the flow of continual change.

Crawling and pulling up has been such a surge. We are now cruising merrily along with new adventures, explorations, and lots of concentrated and joyful work each day.

In the first days of Month 5 Wes inchwormed, then didn't again for three weeks. He strained for weeks, flapped his arms for months. Then finally he lifted one hand, ahhh something new, less than a week later he lifted one knee. One day all of a sudden he was scooting, then the next day--crawling. Key clicks into place, and he's off.

Last Tuesday when Casey left for work, Wesley was only crawling a few crawls forward and then switching to scooting. He was screaming with every move of a limb as if being tortured. He was just starting to pull up on things other than people.

One week later, as Casey left for work, Wesley crawled after him across the living room, no screams. He's pulling up on everything, playing with his toys while standing up, working on improving his cruising skills, and is exploring the areas he could never reach. He can pop right up into standing on the couch or the bookshelves. Now his primary screams of frustration are that he can't yet climb to the third shelf of the bookcase (he can just reach it and look up and whine) or that he's not allowed to play with some things in the room.

He tries to turn corners of the bookshelf, leap from one piece of furniture to the other--he is a daredevil.

He does things now like pull up and hold on with one hand while he leans over to play with a toy with the other hand. As if he didn't just start the standing thing a couple days prior.

When cruising, sometimes he is very careful because he is aware that he is executing a complicated manuever, other times he has little concern for falling or bumping his head. We spot him carefully, because he hasn't yet developed body awareness of his limits with these new skills. His crawling speed has increased to the point that we can't leave the room for more than a moment or he'll be in a different place than when we left. I imagine his speed will increase rapidly in weeks to come.

The progress has been fast. It took about two days for each piece of furniture to be mastered. I love watching him scoot close, put his hands on the furniture, scoot sideways, reposition, sit up, scoot forward, then grab on with both hands, scoot back, take a different grip, then when he thinks it's just right, he manpowers his way up (the kid has the upper body strength of a rockclimber). Then he sees something else while standing and works on cruising toward it.

His crawling and pulling up both came together at the same time. It may be because crawling enabled him to explore new areas of the room, some of which required climbing. Perhaps a coordination-strength threshold was passed. Within a day both skills surged forward in synch as he understood something new about how his legs and arms could work in tandem.

Wesley spends so much time playing, and it is great fun to play with him. If he sees we're doing something fun across the room, he crawls over. If I'm on the floor he hurries over to pull up on me, clammors all over, all the while smiling with delight. I marvel at him standing confidently playing with his toys. He looks so tiny and capable. Such a busy little baby, now with more than a hint of little boy shining through.