Ten months

Tomorrow Laurel will be ten months old. I just looked back and read my blog archive from July 2006, when Isaac was ten months old, and discovered my two children are dramatically different in development. I already knew they were different in temperament, but I had somehow expected them to hit their milestones at approximately the same time. Nope.

Is temperament destiny?

But I'm sure neither of the kids benefits from my making direct comparisons, so I'm going to try to stop doing it. See? Here I am, stopping.

Laurel had her ten-month well-baby exam this week, and her pediatrician ran down the usual developmental checklist: does she pick up and eat finger food (yes), does she pass items from hand to hand (yes), does she sleep through the night (no). Then he asked, "Does she crawl, pull up, cruise around on the furniture?"

No, we replied. No, not at all.

He looked up. "Does she at least crawl?"

She still does not crawl, and what's more, she still wails heartily when put on her stomach. She has recently begun to scoot on her bottom in a sitting position when she's on a smooth surface, but it takes her many minutes to get anywhere. You practically need time-lapse photography to realize she's moving, it happens so incrementally.

The pediatrician was concerned. He basically gave her two months to learn to crawl. If she hasn't gotten mobile by her first birthday in January, he wants us to take her to an occupational therapist. (Funny name, isn't it, like they're going to teach her to type because she was laid off from her assembly line job at the auto plant?) In the meantime, at home we are supposed to encourage her to crawl without, as the doctor said, torturing her.

He diagnosed one of two possible problems, both typical of late crawlers: the Lazy Gene, or Papoose Syndrome.

We don't actually carry her that much -- not a fraction as much as we did Isaac! -- so it's probably not Papoose Syndrome. In fact, she is content to sit on the floor and watch the world go by. This has led me to make my own diagnosis: the Happy Gene. It's not that she's too lazy to learn to crawl, it's that she's perfectly content to stay in one place.