I hate to compare Fox to Boba when she was his age, but she's my only point of reference, so I end up doing it anyway. It's not a competitive kind of comparison, so I don't feel too bad doing it, but it does make me worry at times about things that I probably shouldn't worry about. For instance - walking. Boba started walking pretty consistently a couple of weeks after her first birthday. And Fox...well, I don't know if it was laziness or what, but the boy didn't even seem remotely interested in walking at his first birthday. So then I thought, be patient, Mom, he'll be walking by 13 months. Then 13 months went by. And the down-on-all-fours things was working out just fine for him. Then the 14-month mark hit. By then he was definitely cruising, but as soon as he let go of whatever he was holding on to, it was like - plop. Down he went on his bottom, and he'd start crawling again. I was beginning to get worried.
I know kids are on their own schedule, but with another kid who basically established the baseline for you, you can't help but think, "What's up?" Fortunately, we had no developmental issues to be concerned about (at least none that we were aware of), so more or less we figured that he was just taking his sweet time, and that at some point he would just do it.
Lo and behold, he did.
It's not like he all of a sudden got up from a sitting position and started walking like a pro. It was definitely a gradual thing, like one day he did two steps without help, and then a couple days later it was four steps, and then even later it became eight steps....but then, it seemed, a day after he was taking eight steps, he started taking many steps. And then many, MANY steps.
And then he started dancing and juggling teddy bears and telling knock knock jokes. CRAZY!
Okay, not really. But there was a day where I just went, "Oh my gosh, he's walking! He's finally walking!" I don't know why I was so relieved, but I was. Maybe I lacked faith in him. (Shame on you, Mommy! What a terrible thing to say!) The thing is, he's so....rotund, that I had wondered if perhaps his inability to walk could be blamed on his uneven distribution of weight on his body (i.e., it's ALL on his belly).
But he finally managed it, and we're on about week 3 of walking. And it is very, very,
VERY cute. We like to yell out "LASING!" when he walks, because in Tagalog that means, "DRUNK!" and he sure walks like one. He has little balance (the tummy theory was not entirely incorrect after all), and he picks up his feet every time he takes a step like a little march. And every time he picks up his foot he wobbles, kinda like his body isn't sure what direction he's
going, but the weight is shifting anyway, so his foot lands where ever the
majority of his body was leaning, and sometimes it's not where he was intending to go. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right?
He's like a marching bobble-head. Who's a little drunk. : ) That's our Foxie.
