Judgy Judge Judge Crawly Crawl Crawl

Recently, I was getting to be a bit smug about the whole sleeping thing. Ila was still waking up a couple times a night, but she was back asleep so quickly. And, she's in bed with me, so it's not that big a deal. Roll over, nurse, go back to sleep. Okay, I was beyond smug. I was really starting to become very retroactively judgmental about my early days with Ila. The sleep issue was the worst between 3 and 6 months for us...and I started looking back and thinking maybe it was me; maybe she has always been a fairly decent sleeper - you know, I was all uptight, tightly wound, not accepting this new world of sleep and failing to move through the whole experience without resistance. It was me.

Then last week happened: No; the earlier struggles with sleep were not because of me. It was Ila. She was going through a crappy sleeping phase. Moreover, I haven't grown and become all zen and accepting. Nope. Things just got better. I know this because last week she woke and stayed awake for an hour and cried and woke and stayed awake for two hours and nursed five times in a night and cried and stayed awake. And guess what? I was not all accepting and mature. I was pretty damn grumpy about the whole thing.

What I want to know is why I feel the need to look back and edit or judge or make sense of what happened in the past in some way that is totally dependent on my current experience. Change is just so hard to wrap my head around. It is, I suppose, not unique to me. It is a deeply human impulse to try and create a narrative that is stable. Even constructing a narrative is ultimately sort of questionable vis-a-vis reality...which is not really a narrative at all.

Similarly, the idea of "progress" for babies is totally problematic. I mean, Ila does a lot of experimenting in movement, vocalizing, eating, sleeping...that don't necessarily lead to anything. I guess in general she is progressing in development overall, but it's not a clear step-by-step process. It's full of weird behaviors that she does for a day or three...and then drops. Also, she's just suddenly do things without any prior "practice." I think this is why a lot of folks get so irritated by the milestones.

For example, ;last week, she was crossing her first two fingers on each hand constantly. Now she is done with that. Instead, this week, she claps her hands and throws her hands up over her head like a gymnast triumphantly completing her routine. She loves it if you do it as well. Then, she'll do the whole thing over again. Actually, this week, she's generally into mimicry. This was supposed to start a long time ago according to the milestones, but, as noted earlier, that pretty much means nothing. She will mimic syllables (especially "ma ma ma ma," which I particularly like to encourage), clapping, and her Victory Arms gesture. But who knows? She may stop all this tomorrow and never do it again. Looking for a real clear progression is totally absurd (...which is probably a life lesson from all this that I should try to apply to the rest of my experiences, but we'll see how far that goes).

In regards to the fallacy of "progress," Ila can crawl...but she doesn't really want to. She scoots on her butt a little or tries to stand up and climb on things rather than hang out on her hands and knees. Now, she could just never really crawl as a means of getting around or all this scrabbling and clambering around could lead to crawling. It's very fascinating how unpredictable and individual all this development is.

I had been thinking this was all proto-crawling and that she couldn't actually crawl yet. Eventually, this little crawling-like movements would lead - Ta Da! - to "real" crawling. Well, then I happened to leave her pacifier on one end of the bed and set her down on the other. Suddenly, she was crawling. She can do a lot when properly motivated, apparently. Still she has no interest in crawling out in the world. She may never really like to crawl. Who can say?

At any rate, this is a really exciting period. She loves to pick up toys, figure them out, toss 'em down, scoot around, stand up, do her bouncy little dance to songs she likes, babble and screech, play hide and seek or "chase the mama," get thrown up in the air dangerously close to the ceiling, read, eat books, eat paper in general, eat in general. She's pretty fabulous.