Last August (2014) Emelyn made her first moves. She pulled herself about two inches on the floor with her arms – army crawl style. The tiny distance she traveled made it almost questionable to call it a crawl, but we were beyond thrilled. At 17 months old, she was mobile!
Over the course of
the next year Emelyn began using her arms and legs to perfect her army crawl. She
became quite quick moving around the floor. In physical therapy we worked on
trying to get her on all fours, i.e. attempting to get her belly off the floor.
However, her upper body strength just wasn’t where it needed to be to bear the weight
of her trunk on her arms. Still we persisted. In June Emelyn began showing us
her ability to pull herself from her belly to a sitting position using her
arms. Each time she did this little Emelyn-style push-up she was strengthening
her arms. This led to her newest trick – her swivel hips crawl. I’m still not
sure if I’d call it a full crawl since she’s sort of sitting on her legs, but it’s new
and it’s pretty efficient for Emelyn. And depending on her route and
destination, she uses her new crawl and old crawl interchangeably to get her
where she needs to go.
It’s hard to say if
Emelyn will ever crawl in typical fashion. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it
again, developmentally speaking, Emelyn does what she wants, when she wants. As
you saw in a previous post, we’re working on taking steps, but for Emelyn's independence,
it’s exciting to see her desire to get herself around on her own. This little
gal isn’t waiting around for us – like Elmo, she’s got the moves.
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