Captain Wonder Crawl

About a week ago, Sethie started crawling in earnest. This week, he also learned how to sit up (mostly). This makes him my second child who has crawled before he sat up, though Thomas had a much bigger gap between the two: he crawled at seven months and didn't sit up until he was nine months. In Thomas's case, it had to do with his muscle tone--let's just say he's a natural gymnast. He has great muscle strength, but low muscle tone, i.e. he's very very flexible. Because of it, he needed both speech and occupational therapy until he was about three years-old. Now people are amazed when I mention Thomas's speech therapy considering the fact that he talks about as much as he moves, which is to say, all the time.

When I was pregnant with Sethie, I wondered what it would be like to have a child that hit all his milestones on time, like most of the other babies we knew when Thomas was little. I was never embarrassed to have Thomas in therapy; he clearly needed and benefited from it. Still, it was a stress. You don't like your children to suffer for anything. Listening to him struggle day in and day out to make sounds and form words broke my heart. Of course, every little triumph was a cause for celebration. And he is so very naturally happy in attitude, his struggles didn't seem to affect him as much as they did me. Still, I thought, how much better would it be to have a baby who didn't have to struggle?

I recall telling a friend who was worried about her baby being born with birth defects something to the effect of, "Even if they're born fine, they're still going to have problems. You don't get to choose their problems. They might not have any real problems until they're older and it might be problems with school, or friends, or something we can't even fathom now. You just have to help them with whatever it is. That's what being a parent means." I never could have predicted that I would have a baby two months early, which means of course that his milestone schedule is completely off. He is ten months today, so he's off the sitting up by about four months and the crawling by two or three, depending on who you ask. Does it matter? I look at Thomas whose muscle tone issues might actually benefit him now as he starts into sports requiring flexibility. Sometimes problems become strengths.

And sometimes your children are Captain Wonder Crawl and other times, TV Watching Zombie.