It's been a while since I did a Motor Monday post, but the babies have been learning so many new skills that I've been wanting to write about that I thought I'd get back in the swing of things by talking about their new mobility skills! Gone are the days of being able to lay them down under the activity gyms and walk away (usually to change someone else's diaper) and come back to find them right where we left them! About six or seven weeks ago the babies all started rolling back to belly and a few weeks later they started putting that together with their belly to back roll, becoming truly mobile for the first time! This mobility necessitated a new round of babyproofing and the creation of "baby jail." i.e. a safe zone for temporarily unattended babies!
It was interesting to me that the babies all learned to roll back to belly within a week of each other when learning belly to back was spread out over a couple of months. Ellie was the first to put multiple rolls together to move and this continues to be her primary way of moving. Isaiah does this sometimes too, but less often than Ellie.
Then about three weeks ago, just shy of seven months (5.5 adjusted), Avery learned how to army crawl! Our feisty little Avery who hated being on her tummy and took forever to learn to roll off her tummy (and screamed instead!) was the first to get moving on her tummy. She now spends TONS of time on her tummy and loves her new found mobility. Her favorite thing to crawl after is our phones and now we have to watch where we set them down because she's got an internal tech radar and before you know it she's on the move.
Isaiah's pushing up on straight arms all the time on his tummy and is doing it hard enough that he is always scooting himself backward. I think he gets pretty frustrated because often you can tell that he wants a toy in front of him and gets excited and pushes up, but then just keeps moving farther and farther away. Occasionally he actually goes forward either by getting a little bit of a push off one foot or by lunging forward with his head, but he hasn't figured this out consistently yet.
This stage in development is fascinating to me because kids do such different things! It actually makes it a little tricky I think as a pediatric PT because not every kiddo army crawls and if they do, some really lead with their arms like Avery and others push more with their legs. Not every kiddo rolls and rolls for mobility either. So I often introduce the different options and then see what it looks like is going to work best for that kiddo and then help them along, giving their parents strategies to help them practice.
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| baby jail doesn't look so bad, right? |
It was interesting to me that the babies all learned to roll back to belly within a week of each other when learning belly to back was spread out over a couple of months. Ellie was the first to put multiple rolls together to move and this continues to be her primary way of moving. Isaiah does this sometimes too, but less often than Ellie.
Then about three weeks ago, just shy of seven months (5.5 adjusted), Avery learned how to army crawl! Our feisty little Avery who hated being on her tummy and took forever to learn to roll off her tummy (and screamed instead!) was the first to get moving on her tummy. She now spends TONS of time on her tummy and loves her new found mobility. Her favorite thing to crawl after is our phones and now we have to watch where we set them down because she's got an internal tech radar and before you know it she's on the move.
Isaiah's pushing up on straight arms all the time on his tummy and is doing it hard enough that he is always scooting himself backward. I think he gets pretty frustrated because often you can tell that he wants a toy in front of him and gets excited and pushes up, but then just keeps moving farther and farther away. Occasionally he actually goes forward either by getting a little bit of a push off one foot or by lunging forward with his head, but he hasn't figured this out consistently yet.
This stage in development is fascinating to me because kids do such different things! It actually makes it a little tricky I think as a pediatric PT because not every kiddo army crawls and if they do, some really lead with their arms like Avery and others push more with their legs. Not every kiddo rolls and rolls for mobility either. So I often introduce the different options and then see what it looks like is going to work best for that kiddo and then help them along, giving their parents strategies to help them practice.
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