walk the line

...so did i mention that at cadence’s birthday party, the topic of her walking (or lack thereof) came up? yes, it’s inevitable that when you have a roomful of older women who’ve reared children in generations past that there will be numerous opinions as to what a baby should be doing and when…so one such relative was rather insistent that i promptly get my daughter a walker so that she can practice walking…when i told this relative that cadence can walk in her own good time and that walkers are by and large dangerous (and where in tarnation would we put the thing anyway? she’d be playing bumper cars with the walls and coffee table and sofa fer crying out loud!), she still insisted that cadence should be walking by now…i chose to walk away from the situation before my tongue got the better of me…

...anywho, cadence and i went to a playgroup on saturday morning that meets several times a week in our neighborhood…i happened to mention to the woman who runs the playgroup what my female relative had said about cadence not walking, and she told me that research is showing that the bilateral motion of crawling is good for the developing brain, so i don’t need to be in any hurry to teach cadence to walk…i actually have the sneaking suspicion that cadence has the motor skills to walk…she just doesn’t see the need for it because she can get from point A to point B so much faster by crawling…besides, she's too busy reorganizing our apartment to be strolling around anyways...although she has been known to employ ted's beerbrewing carboy as a walker, as demonstrated in this 6MB video...

...i kinda do wish cadence would walk on her own, but it’s purely for selfish reasons…it would be nice to be able to put her down once in a while when we’re out and about without worrying about her crawling on her hands and knees in god-knows-what filth…

speaking of the playgroup, i’m excited about it! it’ll give cadence a chance to crawl around in a huge space to her heart’s content…the jeans she wore there on saturday will have to be her playgroup jeans because she’s worn the knees down already doing laps…she also loves being around other kids, so this will give her a chance to socialize with others closer to her own size…