That Crawlin' Baby Blues

Recently Elise has been learning to crawl. She's kind of doing an army-crawl now, which is an improvement from her earlier proto-crawl where she would power herself with her legs, but end up draggin her head and upper body along the floor. It seems like it must be a bit difficult from a baby's perspective to learn to coordinate those chubby little limbs, and get around with such a heavy head (infant heads --relative to body weight-- are about 10 times heavier than adults'). She was crying a little bit in the beginning of this clip, but eventually was quite happy that she got over to some papers that were on the floor (we don't usually let her get at papers --- so they are especially interesting and enticing!).

I was looking through music on the computer to find some background music for this video, and after doing a search for "baby", and ruling out all the adult "baby" love songs, came across Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1928 classic blues song called "That Crawlin' Baby Blues". The beginning of the song starts out appropriate enough, about a crawling baby who cries.... crawls and stops in the middle of the floor, and luckily the video clip was short enough to use along with this beginning part, before it gets well into the not-so-cute lyrics of the "blues" part.

Elise's 7 month old update

Elise turned 7 months old this month. Some of her favorite things to do include:

playing peek-a-boo...


blowing raspberries at Jake...

and swinging in the park...


Also, this past month she's started saying "da-da-dad-da-da-daddy" and "ma-ma-mom." In addition, she waves at people and says "hi."

Another new recent event in her life has been her belly crawl. She hasn't yet figured out how to crawl on all fours, but she's getting close. A few weeks ago, she started scooting along - pushing her self forward with her legs with her head on the floor. And now in the past week, she's started doing more of a military, belly crawl. She's using her arms to help pull her along and has her head up off the ground. Its amazing how fast she can get across the room, though, when she wants to.

Oh, and did I mention that she likes to play peek-a-boo?