Katherine update

[dtm]

Well, it's been well over a month and a half since the last Katherine update; in terms of major developmentatl milestones, not much has been going on, though she continues to improve at various ways of getting around.

Over Thanksgiving, we took a road trip up to see relatives in Wisconsin - I enjoyed it, but Jennifer had a lot of trouble dealing with Katherine in my aunt and uncle's house. Although my aunt and uncle are themselves grandparents, and Katherine's second cousin (who is 7 weeks older than Katherine) is in fact over there all the time, the house is not really babyproofed. Among other things, it's entirely too easy to get to the wood burning stove that heats the house. While on the trip, Katherine completed the transition from army crawl to "regular" baby crawl, which really does look different from what adults or older children do when crawling on all fours (see naomikritzer's description of cross-crawling).

Nowadays, Katherine is happily crawling all over, and is still too slow to catch the cats unless the cats are closed in the same room as she is - then she's able to corner them, which tends to end badly. A few weeks ago, she came within half an inch of being scratched on the eye. We're trying to teach her about the idea of petting the cats and not beating on them, but she really doesn't get it.

This past Sunday she did her first furniture cruising - holding onto the footstool and walking from one end to the other (and back again as Jennifer and I sat there tossing the tv remote back and forth). The TV remote and our cell phones are two objects Katherine will reliably head for if she sees them - she can even tell the difference between the "real" remote and the universal remote without batteries that we designated as hers for her to play with. Clearly, adult interest in something makes a serious difference in how exciting it is.

I see that adult-use effect with the computers - on my desk there are two computers, side-by-side. There's the home machine, which is actually shut down and turned off most of the time, and there's the laptop I use for work. (I'm working from home 4 days out of 5). When on my lap, Katherine strains to get at the laptop and touch its keyboard, and won't accept playing on the other keyboard as a substitute, even when I turn on the home machine and get her set up in notepad with a huge font. She'll use the other keyboard a little if she first sees me use it, but I can't, for example, be typing on the laptop and have her content to pound on the other keyboard. (As an aside, those big ancient heavy IBM keyboards can take a surprising amount of abuse)

Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Cross-crawling is a trot. Adults on all fours tend to use a one-limb-at-a-time walk. Anyone who has watched a horse can tell which is faster.:-)

Adult toys are definitely more interesting than baby toys. How else is she supposed to learn the proper way to channel-surf?;-)