Amazing Day

It was an amazing day for Molli. Today was the second day of Denmark’s 5-day (Thu-Mon) Easter holiday, so Trine and I were both at home. The events of the morning were exciting in and of themselves: I sent off a quick email to American family members, and copy it here for non-American family members and non-family members worldwide:

It’s been a very big morning for Molli. Not only has she persevered in trying out her new tricks–the double-lunge forward crawl and the standing alone by holding the rails of her playpen–but she learned a brand new one. I was doing some homework on Trine’s PC in the living room while Trine baked some bread in the kitchen. We were both keeping half an eye on the diaper-clad Molli, who was lolling around happily on her “Hands” quilt with a spoon for entertainment. Trine came in and played with her for a moment, then left the room. I heard a couple of weird wood-thunking sounds as I worked, but didn’t think anything of them because they were accompanied only by happy burbling. So I didn’t even glance over at Molli. Then Trine came in the room and said, “Did you do that?”

I finally turned my head toward Molli. I saw pretty much what you see in the attached picture. But no, I hadn’t given her the rattle and I certainly hadn’t abandoned her while she was sitting up. If Trine had told me “hey, I left Molli sitting up, keep an eye on her,” … well, then I would have kept an eye on her. But Trine hadn’t told me that, so I didn’t know.

Except that Trine hadn’t left her sitting up. She’d sort of twisted Molli around to show her how she might sit up by herself, if she were interested in trying, and had then lain her back down again. Meaning that Molli had indeed somehow sat up all by herself, and, as has been the case with most of Molli’s big developments, we’d both missed it completely.

Very exciting!

But when will she really crawl?!

I should mention that much later in the day I received a warning from my sister, in which she said, “If I were you I would not be so anxious for her to crawl. Once she does, your life is over! Do you really think you’ll be able to write while she’s crawling around the apartment or up that nice white bookcase in the background? I know it is a very exciting milestone but believe me when I say, later is better than sooner!”

Well.

First, here’s a shot from early this morning, of Molli doing some of her semi-crawling:

And here’s a shot of the semi-standing I referred to:

She’s been doing both of these things for a while now. She loves to hold herself up like that in the playpen, but has absolutely no control when she lets herself down. She can hold herself for a minute or two, then she gets bored, tired, or distracted, and your hands had better be there to break the fall. And the crawling… well, I’ve chronicled that pretty well.

John was out of town for our weekly beer stroll this week (chasing Bobby Fischer out in Iceland), but his wife Sandie had the day off so we met her at the lakes and got Liam and Molli together for their weekly date. It was a gorgeous day, the first real day of spring. Tell me this swan didn’t know it:

Alright, even if he didn’t know it, tell me these two didn’t:

As for these two… well, God only knows what they were thinking.

We made it all the way around the lakes, including a nice stop for the requisite beer at Den Franske Cafe, and Molli slept through damn near all of it. We figured she was just wiped out because she’d spent the whole morning almost-crawling, almost-standing, and for-real sitting up on her own. She was almost certainly dreaming sweet dreams of sitting up, lying down, and sitting up again.

On our way home I gave her her first real piggy-back ride, and Trine said this was the expression on her face the whole three minutes of the ride:

But the spectacular thing is what happened later, tonight, after dinner. Trine was playing with Molli on the sofa. Molli was sort of lying on her stomach, perpindicular to Trine’s legs. I noticed Molli making some weird movements out of the corner of my eye (I was more focused on the Simpsons), and suddenly Trine exclaimed, “she crawled! she crawled!”

Been there, done that. Easy to make one of her pseudo-crawls look real on the soft sofa, with Trine’s legs to help her along.

“Put her on the floor,” I said.

So we set her on the Hands quilt (aside to those who might know: why is there an “x” on Sophie’s hand, just under her name?) and put a bunch of toys a few feet in front of her. And she crawled straight to them.

This was real baby crawling, no doubt about it. Trine and I were very excited, but Molli was more interested in playing with the toys we’d been taunting her with. Then she kind of pushed herself up, crawled backward, crabbed sideways, took a few more forward crawls, and finally just rolled over onto her back and started chewing on something. Fifteen minutes later she went to bed without a struggle. She hasn’t made a peep since.

I’m hoping she doesn’t make a single peep all night, because we’re going to need all the sleep we can get now that our life is over…