Baby Gator: Sometimes the little things, are the big things.

I kind of missed writing a 7 month post. I had begun writing a post a couple of weeks before she turned seven months, but then I never finished it, and then she turned 7 months, and now here we are. This is going to have parts of that unpublished post, along with some current updates.

At 6 and a half months Olive started crawling. We were preparing our house to get a bunch of furniture from Mark's parents (they sold their Big Canoe house, and so now we get to have "grown-up" furniture) so the downstairs was pretty much empty. We were using beach chairs to sit in the living room, and the dining room was completely empty when one night I was doing dishes in the kitchen and Mark called for me to come in the living room. There she was slowly, and deliberately crawling.

It was of course very exciting. She had been almost crawling for a couple of weeks. She could get up on all fours, and sometimes she would even have one crawl which consisted of moving one hand and knee forward, but then she would get stuck and couldn't figure out that she needed to move the second half of her body. Or sometimes she would do her inchworm crawl. She was getting pretty good at manuevering herself around without actually crawling, and then one day she put it all together, and now she is a crawling machine.

It was interesting though, because the same weekend she began crawling she had two much smaller milestones, but in someways they were a lot more excited than her crawling. The first one, was when I went to take her from Mark one night. She was sitting in his lap, on the couch, and I reached down to get her, and she reached her arms up to me. I know reaching her arms up doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but she had never done it before, never even come close to doing it before. I think that is what made it so cool, it was completely spontaneous, and here she was performing this action that all little kids do, only she couldn't do it a week ago.

The other milestone was when I went to get her out of her bed when she woke up from a nap and there she was sitting up. She had been doing a pretty solid job of sitting up for awhile, but had never gone from laying down to sitting up on her own. It came as such a shock to me, I couldn't believe it; there she was sitting up and she had gotten that way all on her own!

I know it seems silly that sitting up and lifting her arms up would feel like a bigger deal to me than crawling, but I think it is because I could see the crawling coming. It evolved over time, and was pretty clear that it was coming; the other two things just happened all of a sudden. The fact that they were surprises made them extra special.

Of course that was weeks ago, and now we have moved on to even more surprise milestones like when she started clapping the other day. A big thank you to daycare for that one, because we definitely had not been doing any clapping with her at home. She seems to almost wave sometimes too, and I'm pretty sure daycare is teaching her that as well. Now that she is crawling she crawls to anything (coffee table, couch, ottoman, chair, dvd case) she can pull herself up on so she can stand. She has always loved standing, and now she often times pulls up on the coffee table, and will drum her hands on it for several minutes. At first she did not realize she could not stand on her own, and if there was something on the table she wanted she would try to hold it with both hands, and then fall over backwards. But now she knows to hold on, or she "tripods" herself and leans her chest against the table so she can use both hands at the same time.

She has started saying "da da" a lot. It does not seem to have one specific meaning for her, but instead it means everything. Sometimes she will look straight at you, and very clearly say, "da da." Like she is sure she must be communicating something with you.

She is a very happy 7 month old, and has even started sleeping a little better, which makes for much happier parents as well.