All of the children have had very different early locomotion strategies for when they first became mobile. Alice has achieved independent motion, as you can see from the tracking photo.
Alice gets around in two ways. One is pulling herself along with her hands. She does this only a little bit. More common she moves forward via cantilevering. Alice stretches her arms out in front of her and then rises to her hands and knees / feet. This shifts her torso forward as her arms straighten out. Then she falls back down to the floor. This cycle is repeated to move forward.
Alice also has rotational control. I was trying to get a good photograph of Alice while extended but it was difficult because she would quite rapidly rotate to face me. I initially thought this was because she wanted to be near her Daddy but it turns out that she just wanted to chew on the camera strap.
Alice can also lever herself up to a near upright position if she has something to grab on to. We’re beginning to wonder if she’ll walk before she crawls. Charles and Corwin were late walkers and so developed their crawling to a high art. To some extent that re-enforces the late walking because a good crawl is much faster than initial walking. Also, Alice is a petite flower (like her Mom) while the boys are solid chunks of boyness.
Charles was the most “normal” in terms of moving around by rolling and then by crawling. Corwin developed this very odd “inverse inchworm” technique. It was similar to Alice’s up and down cycle but Corwin would do it on his back, using the back of his head and his heals to arch up and then collapse.
But we’ve now crossed what I view as the most significant threshold, mobility. Alice will require much closer attention now that she won’t stay where she’s put. They grow up so fast!
