Crawling – On the Brink of Mobility

Nehemiah really wants to crawl. He gets up on his hands and knees in the middle of the night and works at it. During the day he lunges from a sitting position to his belly in order to try and crawl. He rocks and squirms and wriggles and pushes, constantly trying to get somewhere. Anywhere. At any moment he could tip over the brink from trying to crawl to cruising about to his hearts content.

I find his compulsion to crawl to be singularly fascinating. He doesn’t seem to know what crawling is, and yet has an overwhelming desire to learn this new skill. He’s never seen another child crawl and yet seems to have some instinctive idea of how to do it. It’s a lot like his rolling compulsion back before he became a certified “Master Roller”. Although he hated to be on his belly he couldn’t help but roll onto his belly. He would wake up in the night screaming after deliberately rolling from his back, again and again and again. This is merely the next stage in his uncontrollable quest to become a little boy instead of a baby, and he’ll be successful soon.