belly crawl

We've been trying to encourage Elijah to crawl for months now. Daddy has been known to construct eleborate structures from Elijah's toys in hopes that Elijah would want to crawl towards them, but to know avail. Even live demos by Daddy didn't inspire Elijah a bit. Every time it looked like he was making a little progress, we made unrealistic predictions like, "I bet he'll crawl in a week", or "I am telling you, he'll crawl by the end of the month". But weeks went by, and so did the months, and Elijah was still happily sitting wherever we'd put him. He did eventually discover that rolling was more fun than sitting as it got him places, but he was still not in a hurry to crawl. Is he lazy, we wondered? We finally concluded that he was just content. Content to be where he was, not "coveting" the toy that was out of reach. That's not a bad quality, is it? And I truly enjoyed being able to just sat him down and read a book for a few minutes.

But as time went on, Elijah (at about 23 lbs now), finally had enough strength to pull himself up on his hands and knees. He now stands up and tries to figure out how exactly one can get around in that position. However, if he needs something fast, he drops the whole "hands and knees" things, plops on his stomach, and...



Yet the quality of contentment can be seen even now. That blue lid from a jar of blocks is pretty much the only thing that he wants bad enough that he would belly crawl towards over a larger distance. (Let me correct myself: it's the only thing of the ones he is allowed to play with; he will crawl large distances towards things he can't have, like our shoes, and we strongly discourage sucking on those.) Everything else is old news, and he'll go to get other things only if they are within a couple crawling movements. Otherwise he'll just play with whatever is near him.