Monday, November 28, 2005

Clapping and crawling

Pete, by the way, has enjoyed two breakthroughs in the last few days. First, on Thanksgiving, he learned how to clap. I noticed that Carolyn's cousin Mike was clapping at Pete. Then I looked and saw Pete clapping back. "My goodness!" said I. "You got him to clap!" And Mike explained that it was actually the other way around--Pete clapped to him first. The next day, Pete developed the skill enough to make a little pat-pat sound with his claps. The day after that, he really got the hang of it: we were in a big group of people, including another baby, and when everybody else clapped, Pete would respond with huge sweeping claps, starting with his hands way out to the side of his torso, always smiling. BAM BAM BAM.

And last night going into this morning, he really figured out crawling. We've seen the elements falling into place for a while. Most recently, he developed the ability to move from a sitting position into a very confident crawling stance on all fours--this was so smooth that it always looked like he was set to zoom across the floor. But then his arms would go forward, and his knees didn't know how to follow, so he would just go down to the floor on his belly. The knees have now figured out how to follow. Which means, of course, that we're in big trouble.

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