Monday, April 20, 2009

There is an Inch Worm in My House

I last posted on Friday about my lifelong involvement with raising, shooting, and eating animals. Since that posting I have found myself the care taker of another interesting member of the animal kingdom. This animal is of course the inch worm.

The inch worm moves by inching up the back half of his body toward the front making a big hump in the middle. Then he inches the front forward to even out his body horizontally. By doing this the worm can travel forward half a body length per effort.

The inch worm at my house doesn't move nearly that much, but he is trying. For those of you still wondering, yes the inch worm is my son Braden. We were sitting in the floor playing last night when he decided to show Mom and Dad his new skill. Braden has never liked being on his stomach. He gets upset easily when placed there. Sometimes he just rolls back onto his backside immediately. We place him on his stomach fairly often so he can work on his baby fundamentals. His fundamentals are more advanced than the last time I posted about them. Now he can easily raise his head so all of his work is toward the ever freeing skill of crawling.

Until last night Braden moved about his blanket on the floor by rolling or rotating around on his rear end. He could reach the 4 corners of his colorful blanket world by doing those things. Last night he added a new move to his repertoire. Without provocation he rolled onto his stomach and started inching around. He put forth maximum effort to move very little, but of course I was still proud.

I have no idea what the normal development pattern is for a baby. Before Braden I had exactly zero experience with that sort of thing. Now I consider myself well versed on baby development and parenting up to 5 months of age. Anything beyond that can be filed under "wait and see." I am pretty certain that imitating that ever so interesting inch worm is a step in the right direction towards crawling. Maybe I should say it is a step in the direction of a having a wild baby roaming the house at all times. That in turn is a step towards adding border control agent and bounty hunter to the list of jobs Arica and I perform every day.

5 comments:

PJ Mullen said...

I loved that point in time. My son hated tummy time too, but we were obsessed with the shape of his head. It is very cool to watch them figure out how their arms and legs work is it?

Apok said...

It would be awesome if his next stop was as a glow worm. You could save a bunch on your electric bill!

SurprisedMom said...

It's so much fun watching a child, especially your own, learning his skills one "inch" at a time! As for being a border control agent and bounty hunter, I think you got that in one, or is it two? I read your post and all the memories came flooding back.

WeaselMomma said...

How cute. He will be mobile soon.

GreenJello said...

I love it when they inch backwards... and end up against something. Then they get all mad because they can't move anymore. :)