After conquoring the backwards crawl and nailing the sofa surf, your little one’s next step is indeed their first step! This month, Liz Fraser looks at the progression from baby to toddler and the loveable chaos that surrounds getting your baby up on his feet!
At some point near or around your child’s first birthday, you will have the following conversation, or one very similar:
- ‘Come on! Come on, you can do it! That’s it – walk to Mummy! Good boy – keep going! That’s brilliant! Careful now. Steady… Watch out! Mind the coffee table! Stop…!’
- Crash.
- ‘Waaaaaaah!’
- ‘Aargh! No! Are you OK?’
- A mad dash is made for the plasters and antiseptic and you’ve realised your child has taken his first steps.
There is something so deeply rooted about the desire to see our offspring walk that I think it must be an evolutionary drive – ‘Child must hunt woolly mammoth. Child must walk.’ That kind of thing. And so, when they are no bigger than a large teddy bear, we begin to encourage our babies to stand up, shuffle their feet and put one in front of the other in order to move forward.
More fool us, because at that very second we realise how much easier our lives were when they could only sit down or shuffle about - and that our workload has just tripled! It’s also the moment where every valuable, dangerous or breakable item in the whole house gets moved up to that higher shelf…
There are several phases that make up the learning to walk process; some of which your child will probably have mastered during the first year:
- Air dancing. This occurs almost from birth (it’s one of the reflex reactions the paediatrician should check within a few hours) and it’s very amusing. Hold a baby upright and let its feet gently touch the floor, and it will start bending its knees, tapping its feet and generally looking as though it would run off if you would only put it down for a moment.
- The wobbler. This starts around eight months or so, when your baby is strong enough to stand up for a while when leaning against a low chair, coffee table or your knees. After about thirty seconds, her legs forget what they are supposed to be doing and she collapses onto her big, padded bottom. Ta-da! Be careful at this stage – it’s tempting to try and encourage babies do this a lot, but they still have very soft, delicate joints and ligaments, and too much weight-bearing can damage their legs, knees and hips.
- Hands free. That first ‘Look – no hands!’ moment is thrilling, and the look of surprise, joy and immense pride on your child’s face will almost match yours. Try to be close by for these feats of death-defying balance and coordination: they usually don’t last longer than five seconds before your child topples over, still as straight as a board.
- First steps. What a wonderful moment! I will never forget watching our first child stagger towards me, arms outstretched, teetering occasionally for dramatic effect and wearing only a nappy and a huge grin. These first steps, and the many lunges like it, will bring joy to even the most stressed, tired and frustrated of parents.
- Back-breaking. As soon as babies are able, walking is all they want to do. Cue you bending over for six hours a day holding hands and moving along at 1 mile an hour. It’s hell on the back, but it’s a phase that every parent goes through and it’s over within a month or two. Hopefully…!
There are a couple more downsides to having a walker in the house:
- first up is that the unstable, accident-prone nature of the early stage of learning to walk can result in your child’s first bouts of obvious physical injury. This is of course bad for the child, and you should also be prepared for some tut-tutting in the supermarket as you wheel around a child with two black eyes and a split lip. You know he walked into the bathroom door – twice – but Nosy Nora doesn’t, and will give you a look you’ll never forget.
- Secondly, once he or she is mobile your child will never sit still again, and every time you turn away they walk off to do something they shouldn’t. You can only appreciate the gravity of this once it happens, and when you have spent six months dedicating much of your time and energy into getting your child off her bottom and onto her own two feet, only to find yourself chasing after her and asking her to sit DOWN for the next four years, you do wonder why you were in such a rush!
But of course it’s not all bad. You are now the proud owner of a toddler and this is a huge leap for all of you. Having a child who can move about unaided, and increasingly fast, will change the life you have together forever and it’s still one of the biggest and most exciting moments in a child’s, and a parent’s, life. Just don’t wish it to happen tooooo soon…
