The desire to move

I guess before you force yourself to use every muscle in your body in a new and difficult way, you've got to have an end goal in mind. While Anna is not crawling yet, she certainly has the desire to move. (I say "yet," although Matt & I had a debate yesterday as to how we will define the "First Crawl." We want to get the sticker on the correct day on her calendar :) At first, I actually wanted to call yesterday the first crawl because she made forward progress. She does this by getting up on her knees and flopping forward. Sometimes this results in going backwards, which is incredibly frustrating to her as she is measuring her progress towards whatever toy, or magazine*, she is trying to reach. But Matt convinced me that we should define crawling not by the forward progress but by actually moving a knee and hand forward. So when you see, "First Crawl" on the blog, you'll know what we mean.) Mostly, she sees something she wants a few inches out of reach and works like crazy to get there. Although it is pretty funny when she notices something that she wants across the room and this is what will motivate her to flop onto her belly from a sitting position and start trying to move. You can't say she doesn't set high standards for herself :)

*Until a few weeks ago Anna was generally content playing with her toys. She still likes her toys, but as of late she is much more interested in anything that is not hers - remote control, papers, pens, cell phone, flashlight, adult food, etc. The other day I left her sitting on the floor while I went upstairs to get something and when I came back down I found her rummaging through her diaper bag - which I can't imagine how she got because I really don't think I left it that close to her!