Molli MaMove

Molli’s getting more active, more agile, and more aggressively curious every day. Weird new behaviors pop up all the time. But before I get into that in any depth, I want to show you why she’s so close to standing independently already. I deliberately stalked her with the camera one morning earlier this week with no other purpose than to get her posture recorded.

Here you can see her in the I’ve-been-sitting-but-now-I-think-I’ll-crawl position:

Here it is from another angle:

It’s not hard to imagine how she’d been sitting, or how she intends to go into her crawl. But you can also see very clearly that she’s distributing herself in a way that gravity doesn’t just slam her back down to the ground. Every once in a while, as happened up at morfar’s last weekend, she hesitates in this halfway position, slowly raises her back, and lo&mdash! She’s standing. Granted, she looks like a cross between a novice surfer and a sumo wrestler with the shits, but she really is capable of standing upright. Eventually she drops back down into her crawl, or sometimes back onto her ass in a (surprised) sitting position, but it’s just amazing to see this girl who’s been crawling for two weeks already experimenting with unsupported standing.

Her supported standing is so common now that some of the thrill is beginning to wear off. And more on that in a minute. First, this is just a cute picture of her excellent taste in music (it’s a CD):

Back to her standing issues. They are indeed getting more frequent. At one point earlier this week I was doing something on the living room computer while Molli fiddled and faddled to my side. I think she was playing with Barney. In a behavioral error the likes of which I’ve reported several times already on this blog, I let my mind drift and focus on whatever I was doing on the computer. I heard the “thwump, swoosh, thwump, swoosh” of Molli moving about around and behind me, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was cognizant of everything in the living room and exactly where it was, and my paternal sonar recognized that her movements weren’t putting her in harm’s way.

Far from it. A sudden jerk on my chair pulled me out of my fog immediately, and fortunately the camera was right there on the desk in front of me. Here’s what I saw:

And I have to say, we are getting used to it. She crawls to things, grabs them, and hoists herself up on her knees all the time. It’s only “special” when she gets up on two legs, but even that, as I’ve said, is happening more and more. What’s more, she’s beginning to get a feel for the apartment. She knows what rooms things are in, and in the past couple of days (but especially today) she’s begun actually leaving the room Trine and I (or both of us) are in in search of greener pastures. That is frankly weird. We were her entire univers until now. Nothing was more fun or more interesting than mommy or daddy. Over the course of the past week or two the cats have joined the category, but since they tend to follow us around, and their whereabouts are a mystery if they’re in another room, that didn’t really count. But several times today she’s wandered out of the living room to cross the hall, enter the kitchen, and try to eat the cat food, or left the bedroom to wander down the hallway in pursuit of God-knows-what.

She has to be chased, of course, because if there’s anything climbable wherever she’s headed, she’s bound to hoist herself up—and until about an hour ago, we’d never seen her make a successful soft landing without at least a little assistance.

This is also inconvenient for housework, as Trine learned this afternoon:

And as exciting and hilarious as all this is, not everyone in the house is thrilled to see Molli’s new skill set:

Another new development is her absolute joy whenever Trine or I have been away from her for a while and we suddenly show up. She doesn’t always express it—if she’s tired, cranky, or hungry, for example—but when she does, it’s priceless. I already had the camera trained on Molli when Trine walked in the door Friday night—making her the luckiest woman in the world, because this is Molli’s reaction:

Lastly, she did begin one new behavior today that’s especially weird—none of the baby books mention it. I’m sure it’s just a freak thing, but Molli whistles. Genuine whistles. She was doing it all morning, especially while she crawled around. It was the strangest thing to see this little baby crawling around and whistling. I know you’re thinking, “Oh, it was probably just a big dry booger making her nose whistle,” or “maybe she was just pursing her lips and breathing hard,” but I swear to you she was actually whistling. For real. Seriously. Trine will even back me up on it. In fact, Trine was the one that noticed it first. I’d heard it but ignored it because I thought Trine had been whistling!

I haven’t got it recorded, yet, but as soon as I do you’ll see. (Or hear.) Weird, weird, weird.

This concludes your Saturday Molliblog. Thanks for tuning in.