Let’s Hear it for the Rocking Commandos!

One of my friends described her daughter’s strong upper bodied snake-like shimmy across the floor as commando crawling. Totally apt! With that upper chest strength, this little lady will surely be great at pull-ups one day, a skill that I sadly never mastered....

At the time of this said crawl, LLC was feverishly rocking on all fours but not going anywhere aside from backwards. She’s been rocking in the “all fours” pose for some time now but whenever she attempts to move a leg forward she ends up toppling onto her side.

Fast forward one week and LLC has achieved forward movement! Between all that practice and possibly from watching her friend, she’s now sporting a half commando, half raised on knees crawling manoeuvre.

Chris first spotted this “milestone” when I called home after work and he put me on speaker phone a few feet from LLC. Naturally my voice is difficult to resist, so low and behold LLC managed to inch towards the phone and add forward crawling to her repertoire.

So she’s now on the move! She doesn’t go too far yet but she does go exactly where she shouldn’t – the fireguard under our mantel, Rico’s bed and straight to the bottle of Shout next to my foot when I was spraying some stained clothing.

Maybe this is the time to start thinking about child proofing? I wouldn’t describe our house as a danger zone but it’s not particularly child friendly. We have cold, hard slate floor through much of the downstairs. Our stairs are narrow and steep. These are not things we plan to change and I’m loathe to morph our house into Fort Knox but we are planning to get stair guards and lock for under our kitchen and bathroom sinks where there are cleaning products.

I’ve had a look around on the floor “from LLC’s level” and there are plenty of things she could make mischief with but I’ll just have to tell her what is allowed and what is not allowed. Any tips about keeping a commando crawler safe and this whole child proofing malarkey?